Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
n n n n Trends & Technologies ning trial software, we need to run it locally on our own hardware so we can assess what sort of real-world experience we will have. Suffice it to say, the idea fell flat. Bright Spots Fear not, it isn’t all doom and gloom. As I indi- cated earlier, I am a big fan of remotely hosted computer resources (Say it with me!), or we can call it RHCR for short. Te key is to use this newfound power responsibly. We all know that with great power comes great responsibil- ity. If we consider that for the foreseeable fu- ture our Internet connections will not provide 100 percent uptime, will not be available all the time when we are away from the home or office, and will not provide content-creator- style bandwidth anytime soon, then we can begin to understand how we and our software vendors should leverage this RHCR. One successful RHCR strategy is to provide a service that can work without intervention and can sustain breaks in connectivity. Data backup is perhaps the best example of this. Te second reasonable use for RHCR is remote compute power. I know I said many people rejected the idea of rendering via EC2, but there are also many people who work with smaller clients and will be able to leverage this sort of on-demand power. Te advantage here is that the remote system goes off and performs its duty without necessarily requiring a constant connection. When the compute is done, the data is piped back to you and everyone is happy, which is a good usage scenario for RHCR. As you may have determined, the most chal- lenging aspect of leveraging the cloud is inter- acting with a remotely hosted application. Te more complex the application, the more com- plex the problem, mainly because people who use complex applications tend to sit in front of them for hours and hours at a time. I believe there is a place for cloud computing and inter- active applications, but for them to be most useful to the consumer, they should be highly focused applications that the user would gen- erally interact with for less than an hour at a time and probably not every day. Once you get to everyday usage, I firmly believe that running the application locally is a couple of orders of magnitude more reasonable. I would like to see more companies being creative with their cloud offerings. Rather than just cramming their existing monolithic ap- plications onto a remote server, why not find new ways to provide focused technologies to a larger base in a way that actually makes sense for the cloud today? But that’s just me. So where is all of this heading? What is the future of the cloud and 3D? Te bandwidth will undoubtedly become broader and our connections more stable. Wi-Fi will continue to push further into the wide-area domain. In my utopian view of the world, Internet access will become a basic utility, like power or water, and will be just as available. When it becomes fast, constant, and ubiquitous, we can relax somewhat about that single point of failure and move evermore toward ultra-thin client network devices (the iPad is a forerunner in this area). When I have the confidence that broadband connections will be as readily avail- able as power when I am out and on the go, I’ll be happy to give up lugging a multicore laptop in favor of a paper-thin OLED device with multitouch to run my 3D application from the cloud. Until then, it’s my firm opinion that we all need to get back to reality. n Brad Peebler is president and co-founder of Luxology, with 20-plus years of extensive industry experience. 70 July 2010