Video demo: David Perry shows off cloud gaming service Gaikai

As Jim recently took a lengthy look into in his Ragdoll Metaphysics column, the "games on demand" concept of cloud gaming gained a serious foothold during this year's GDC with demonstrations by startups OnLive and Gaikai, and, he says, "suggests that the days of us buying powerful home processing hardware - be it consoles or PCs - could be numbered."

Today, former Shiny head David Perry uploads this first video demo of Gaikai and plays -- in-browser, with no plugins -- Spore, Mario Kart 64 and more via "a remote server with a 800 mile round trip to my PC."

Perry explains most of the details in the video itself, but also posts some more technical information:

* Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that's where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it's not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don't notice it anyway.)

* This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I'm not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.

* We designed this for the real internet. The video compression codecs change in realtime based on the need of the application (or game), and based on the hardware & bandwidth you have. (For Photoshop we make sure it's pixel perfect.)

* Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)

Read more about the demo at Perry's blog post, where he notes that the company "will start buying bulk servers soon and after that, we will begin closed beta in California, so make sure to sign up at: gaikai.com if you want to help us out."