Football is a game of inches; SaaS is a game of miles

You too can help us test AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit in the cloud.

On Saturday my undergraduate alma mater, University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL), played its rival school, Louisiana State University (LSU), in college football. LSU defeated ULL 31 to 3. That was to be expected since LSU is a larger school and is nationally ranked. What was unexpected is that ULL had the ball on the LSU 4 yard line with a first and goal and failed to score. ULL ran four plays up the middle and was stopped on the last play just inches from the goal. They say football is a game of inches, and I guess they are correct.

Re: system requirements for Project Twitch

I have seen many blog postings about the 1,000 mile limit for Project Twitch. The goal of Project Twitch is to let you run applications like AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and Maya remotely using the internet. In responding to some of the feedback we have received at [email protected], Autodesk Labs VP, Brian Mathews, has pointed out:

The only reason for the distance requirement is to make sure you have a good user experience: you are dealing with the laws of physics on network latency with distance. Other services often use more bandwidth than our solution, have more latency, have lower frame rates, and therefore might not give the same immersive experience. Other services work at any distance but have a degraded user experience that is more of a “remote desktop” experience rather than feeling like you are running locally. We believe (and are testing with customers) that our Project Twitch experience is much more like the real deal: higher frame rates, lower latency, more realism, less bandwidth. Rather than aiming at the convenience of remote access for occasional file access, we are shooting for a high quality experience. Thus the 1,000 mile limit essentially keeps your network latency around 35ms.

By the way, when I drew the green circle around the Bay Area to show the radius of allowable connections, it was not to scale. It was only to make a point. So yes I don't really expect anyone to test Project Twitch from a boat in the Pacific 999 miles off the coast of the Bay Area.

Keep that feedback coming in. We're learning a lot. As Shaan Hurley says "Are you twitching to try it?"

Evaluating internet latency while running design applications remotely is alive in the lab.