There’s something that’s been going on for the last few months that we haven’t really had an eye for here at Android Kenya. That something is what Google is calling Project Stream.
As the name insinuates, the “project” (Google has a lot of those going at any given time) is meant to, well, stream. Steam games, to be specific.
You see, while we may still be a little far away, we are entering an age where it is going to become the norm, rather than the exception, to play games without having them installed locally on whichever machines we are doing so from so that the remote servers do all the necessary heavy-lifting. Of course, one will still need a machine that can handle Chrome effectively (read: a sizeable amount of RAM) and a very fast and consistent internet connection (no, not you Home Fibre customers) in order to exorcise the ghost of low latency.
In the case of Google’s Project Stream, that means being able to play all our favourite AAA titles on things like its Chrome browser. In fact, as one would expect, Chrome is where Google has been testing on since during the beta test run that ended on January 15th.
That is all good and, mostly, away from our usual focus on this blog until some interesting code showed up recently making reference to DualShock 4, the popular gamepads for Sony’s PlayStation 4 console, in the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) dynamic sensor commits.
While the code doesn’t tell us much and the link between it and whatever Google is doing with Project Stream is still up in the air, a popular theory (which we are also advancing at this point in time) is that we’ll get to see the said PlayStation controllers supported by the upcoming version of Android, Android Q.
While I don’t foresee any scenario where Google will try to replicate whatever it is doing with Project Stream on the desktop on mobile as well, which would mean using something as powerful as the DualShock 4 on the same browser we use to play that T-rex game when there’s no network connection (or there is but there is a download elsewhere on the network – yeah that sounds bizarre), it could come in handy for so many things.
Some of us already enjoy playing games on the NVIDIA Shield using a controller and the opportunity to be able to use it on the phone is just too good to pass up. Here’s to hoping that the folks at Google have similar feelings.
Or, and this is highly likely much as we’d want to be optimists, it’s all hot air and there is nothing to see here.
