In the Silicon Valley conference room of OnLive, Steve Perlman touches the lifelike 3-D face of a computer-generated woman displayed on his iPad. Swiping the screen with his fingers, Perlman rotates her head; her eyes move to compensate, so that she continues to stare at one spot. None of this computationally intensive animation and visualization is actually taking place on the iPad. The device isn't powerful enough to run the program responsible—an expensive piece of software called Autodesk Maya.Rather, Perlman's finger-swipe inputs are being sent to a data center running the software. The results are returned as a video stream that seems to respond instantaneously to his touch.
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