EA Announces Project Atlas, a AI-Powered Cloud-Based Streaming Platform

EA is expanding beyond the realm of game publishing, it seems, as over on Medium, EA Chief Technology Officer Ken Moss announced a brand-new cloud-based streaming platform, Project Atlas, which looks to catapult gaming into the next generation.
 

“Today, I want to share an inside view of what we’re working on to bring together some of the most transformative technologies into an integrated “engine + services” game development platform. A platform designed from the core to harness the massive power of cloud computing and artificial intelligence and putting it into the hands of game makers in a powerful, easy to use, one-stop experience.

We’re calling this Project Atlas and we believe in it so much that we have over 1,000 EA employees working on building it every day…”

To abridge the article… significantly, Project Atlas is exactly what you’d expect from a cloud-based streaming platform, with some slight adjustments. Players will install a client on their computers, which would ‘stream’ gameplay directly to your PC. The gameplay is being run on EA’s powerful servers, which means that as long as you have a stable and strong internet connection, even the worst laptops could enjoy a gaming experience that would rival the most powerful gaming desktops.

But here’s the twist: they also want to use “artificial intelligence” to optimize the streaming process and to improve the actual games that will be streamed on the platform. He offered this example:
 

"For example, imagine that you’re playing Madden, and you’ve just thrown your second interception of the game against the same cover 2 defense that caused the first turnover. Instead of the commentator simply stating that you threw a pick, the AI enables contextual, real-time commentary to reference the fact that you’re throwing to the sideline against a cover 2 defense and should have thrown against the weak zone over the middle to your tight end, who was open on the route. This would certainly push the game into a greater level of contextual and experiential realism."

This concept is both extremely optimistic and cautiously plausible, as a lot of the technology he mentions in the piece already exists in some capacity or another. The trouble, of course, is implementing it… and seeing if EA can keep it’s unhinged avarice in check enough to make it worth the effort. That said, he didn’t even pretend that Project Atlas would be released soon, so we have lots of time to wonder about how good it’ll actually be.

Fingers crossed…