While I never really believed in Mighty as a concept, I think the technology has enormous potential in some industries. A robust, performant and versatile VNC like toolkit to enable traditionally desktop software to be made available in the cloud could be be very successful.
There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made available in a collaborative environment for the first time using some of the Mighty tech. I hope someone picks it up and explores other ways it could be used.
There are tons of these solutions in production for well over 10 years. Big media customers has run virtualized edit bays in AWS for at least 4 years at this point.
Reasons people don't use these solutions are the same reason Mighty ended up not working. Even in CAD applications, latency matters when trying to move objects in 3D space with precise mouse input or using a 3dconnexion spacemouse. Sure, you can overcome latency by doing what Google essentially invested in with Stadia, run GPU's closer to the edge but at that point the cost of just buying workstations for your employees is not that different from acquiring a stable connection (for 8+ hours a day) with the fee of renting the hardware.
We’ve been working on a way for browser-based apps to run a rendering thread on the server and streaming back to the client, possibly composited into client-sode-rendered UI. So far the results are promising: you get the power of a server-side GPU with no additional latency for the normal UI interactions that can be drawn without a server round-trip.
Here’s a demo of a full-blown Blender “running in the browser” (I don’t have a demo with local compositing yet, so this is all server-side)
Having used both Citrix and Mighty, it’s clear Mighty cared about latency in a way that Citrix doesn’t (or, more generously, is out of control of Citrix since they don’t own the end-to-end system)
I think it's more of a hybrid approach, the web renderer was running in the cloud, the ui was native and local.
I beleve Citrix is mostly a standard VNC type product where everything is rendered on a server and streamed. I was envisaging a toolkit to enable you to build an app where parts of it run in cloud, parts of it locally.
Think of a 3D cad tool, the ui could be all local, but the rendering and compute is in the cloud. Or a 3d physics based ray tracing app, you could do the 3d wire frame locally, but have the real-time ray tracing happening on a very large server.
On top of that, by have a cloud based state, it's only one step away from marking that state shared with other users to enable collaboration.
You're misinformed. Citrix has plugins for managing aspects of GUI rendering, video/audio playback and GPU pipelines local on the client, which are a key part of the "secret sauce" behind their success in industry.[1] This is a product which is being used today for remote CAD/CAM workflows in the largest firms, whereas afaict applications of Mighty's product to this problem sphere is nothing but idle fantasy by HN posters?
There is no technical challenge here. You can rent GPU instances from any cloud provider. Each of those has a built-in hardware video encoder. Then you can proceed to stream your CAD app/game/desktop/website over the browser with WebRTC. It's almost all OTC software. Stadia does it. Geforce Cloud does it.
There is no technological innovation left in this space. You can package it with a nice GUI and convenient user experience, but I feel like that's hardly a billion dollar startup idea.
There are many CAD, Visualisation, Rendering, Editing, and Simulation tools that are incredible CPU, GPU or Memory intensive that could be made available in a collaborative environment for the first time using some of the Mighty tech. I hope someone picks it up and explores other ways it could be used.