A long time ago in a galaxy far away I worked on Project Twitch when it was on Autodesk Labs. This was a technology preview of an experiment in reduced latency when running Autodesk applications on remote servers. This eventually led to Project Blink which emerged as Autodesk Remote.
The peer-to-peer Autodesk Remote is a solution where Autodesk Subscription customers can run desktop applications on their own computers and access them from other computers/devices. This is great for running applications over the internet or on a corporate intranet. The reduced latency is made possible by OTOY technology. Autodesk Remote peer-to-peer is available to Subscription customers, and Autodesk 360 is used for the authentication process.
For peer-to-peer Autodesk Remote, Autodesk Subscription customers install an Autodesk Remote application on the computer where the application is running and also on the computer/device where the user is doing the driving from. There are two places where special software needs to be installed. In the Autodesk Remote peer-to-peer case, the customer uses his own license to the Autodesk application and just runs it remotely.
Yesterday we had a press release that resulted in lots of posts like the following:
This new approach is not to be confused with the peer-to-peer Autodesk Remote. It is another possible alternative based on Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). Feedback will determine a lot.
For the Autodesk Remote EC2 solution, no special software is needed. All that is required is an internet connection and a modern browser that supports WebKit, HTML5, and JavaScript. This is currently in the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox but other browsers, such as IE 11, could come on board in the future.
Autodesk and OTOY are conducting trials of the technology now. We set up the Amazon instances (with 3ds Max, Inventor, Revit, and Maya — some of our most 3D-graphics-intensive applications), and customers then try them out. I'm conjecturing here, but I suspect the thinking is that down the road customers would pay a fee for the licenses to our applications and also pay for the Amazon EC2 instances that they rent. Customer are essentially renting the hardware and the software. With regard to data, the customer files can be stored on Autodesk 360, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. — wherever they want.
I am eager to see the feedback that results from the OTOY trials. Thanks to Senior Principal User Experience Designer, Erin Bradner, Principal Engineer, John Schmier, and User Experience Senior Director, Mark Davis for help with the flow diagrams. Technologist, Shaan Hurley, gave the technology a try. See his blog post for the results:
Remote control is alive in the lab.
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