Autodesk and OTOY partnered to build a cloud streaming system that could bring all of Autodesk's high end commercial applications in the cloud. This culminated with the release of the Autodesk Remote in 2013 for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I managed the mobile teams, oversaw the end-to-end design, led the initial iOS development, and optimized the ORBX video codec for mobile platforms.
This system allows users to log into Autodesk servers and immediately begin running Autodesk's popular software suite (including Maya, AutoCAD, Inventor, etc.) through their device without requiring a large download.
This system works by streaming a low-latency high resolution video and audio stream of the server's screen down to the client, while streaming the client's input state back to the server. The key to making this work is OTOY's proprietary ORBX video codec. This codec was designed to compress video extremely quickly on modern GPUs, while also decompress them quickly on legacy hardware (in addition to the usual goals of minimizing bandwidth costs and maximizing quality).
The mobile aspects of this product involved a significant amount of development effort, with a particular focus on engineering the system to run at 60 frames per second, at high resolutions (2048x1536+), with potentially limited hardware. For this, I optimized the stream pipeline to better leverage the (newly) multi-core mobile CPUs and the compute power of the GPUs. I also vectorized the video codec with NEON intrinsics and reduced memory movement and consumption. At launch, the mobile system managed to deliver 100+ frames per second with a 1080p stream on 3rd generation iPad hardware.
This release supports the following server side platforms:
Windows (all versions)
Mac OSX 10.6+
Linux (several distros)
This release supports the following client side platforms:
HTML5 Capable Browsers (with WebGL)
Mobile Browsers (without WebGL)
Windows (all versions)
Mac OSX 10.6+
iOS 5.0+
Android (various)
