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by mncharity 3419 days ago
> Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency

One approach I've seen mentioned is sending a larger-than-used field of view (and resolution), and then locally deciding, with more recent orientation data, which portion to use. Also depth segregation of the scene, and sending multiple copies of nearfield, selected by recent position.

These approaches might result in sending more data than the displayed video.

I don't necessarily disagree with your suggestion of gigabit adequacy. Though after hearing similar suggestions so many times over the decades, about everything on Moore's law curves, and then having them almost always be wrong, I'm... leary of this form of suggestion.

But one way such estimates fail, is being hit by an "oh, we didn't expect that one". So I'm brainstorming (well, merely sort of musing) about potential surprises.

Hmm, surprises... One advantage of a single video stream is the system always knows what's needed next. The user may turn it off, but not much else. The above are perhaps examples of needing to send speculative content, which acts a demand multiplier. The future equivalent of web page preloading.

As people acquire automated assistants, one thing they may do is speculative exploration and data gathering. When a user's eye pauses on a github project, not just download everything about the project, to produce the desired pithy little briefing popup, but also other pages associated with the repo authors (still alive? any replacement project?), news articles, related work, and so on. Automation of the 'github project evaluation dance', which in the fine-grained node.js ecosystem, is frequent. So what is now a few bytes of web link, and a rare on-demand textual mouse popover, followed by slow manual surfing, might be become an immediate massive demand spike, and pervasively common? One potential of VR vs 2D screen UIs, is that while screen realestate must be severely managed, else clutter, VR may permit vastly greater inclusion of speculative "some related stuff", blended as low-cognitive-overhead ambiance. Once upon a time, a web page had the bandwidth demands of a few lines of ascii email from a dumb terminal - no longer.