Perry reveals Gaikai on iPad

Gaikai's David Perry has revealed the first work-in-progress shot of gameplay streaming service Gaikai running on Apple's iPad.

Posting on his blog, Perry revealed a shot of the working prototype, which you can see below, and in much higher resolution elsewhere on his site.

Few additional details were forthcoming, so Digital Foundry dropped David a line to get some more technical insight on the achievement.

"It's 1024x768, very crisp, the photo is from my iPhone," Perry told us, meaning that the Gaikai video streaming is operating at the very same resolution as the iPad screen itself.

"All iPad inputs are streamed through a translation system to the server, so we can re-map anything to anything in real-time. We hide a virtual keyboard off to the side, so you can type as well (like to login). It's just a teaser as the iPad just arrived, once they are done with the video optimisation we will show it off."

The iPad's native video player isn't up to scratch for dealing with streaming gameplay, and of course the fact that iPad doesn't support Flash (as per the PC/Mac version) means that the Gaikai implementation needed to be built up from scratch, presumably via a bespoke app.

Bearing in mind Apple's ever-evolving rules on censorship, there's also the chance that Gaikai wouldn't be cleared to run on the tablet any way. That said, you'd hope that an HTML5 implementation of Gaikai would be an open route for the system to be implemented on Apple's hardware.

In the meantime, here's Perry's tantalising photo.