Microsoft provides live demonstration of how the cloud can help gamers

Virtual reality through the Oculus Rift headset is novel enough. But VR through Internet Explorer, enabled with just a few lines of code? Microsoft just demonstrated it at its Build conference, drawing applause from a room packed with developers.  On this, the second day of its annual developers conference, Microsoft is focusing on enhancements to its Visual Studio software development toolkit to assist in the creation, publication, debugging, and porting of Windows apps. 

Microsoft hasn’t held back from talking about how offloading computational efforts to the cloud will advance gaming, but now they are finally showing us what that looks like. In short, this system allows developers to offload processing to remote servers, which in theory frees up local hardware to improve things like rendering. This week during Microsoft’s developer-centric Build conference in San Francisco, the company showed off a custom tech demo illustrating the system running on PC hardware. Importantly, what we’re seeing here in the video above is not Xbox One footage and the demo is merely a prototype. Still, as we see in the video, the PC that’s not connected to Microsoft’s Azure server network seriously struggles when the building begins to collapse. Meanwhile, the connected rig is able to achieve a far more steady frame-rate throughout.