Allow me, if you will, to rock your world. Imagine playing the latest graphical juggernauts with the settings almost completely maxed out on your old clunker of a PC or Macbook. This is without upgrading a single component or overclocking a single processor. Sounds too good to be true, right? Enter OnLive.

OnLive is a videogame streaming service from Rearden Studios founder Steve Perlman, formerly of Atari, Apple, and WebTV to name a few, and Mike McGarvey, formerly of Eidos. It's currently being beta tested in-house and is being flaunted around this year's GDC like new puppy.

So exactly what is OnLive? It's simple really. With OnLive, the game you're playing is not actually running on the computer you're sitting at. It's running on a supercomputer at OnLive HQ and the video footage of said game is streamed live over the internet and is played back before your very eyes in standard definition or 720p high definition. It's essentially cloud gaming and you're controlling another computer with your videogame controller.

The only hardware you'll need is the OnLive micro-console that would cost roughly the same as a Wii or Xbox 360 Arcade and the OnLive controller itself. Obviously a broadband internet connection is required with a 1.5mbps connection required for SD and 5mbps for HD.

This obviously begs the question, "What about the lag?" Despite my high-speed cable or ADSL2+ connection, sometimes I can barely stream a smooth version of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up over YouTube, let alone 720p of HD game footage. Rearden Studios claims that its servers will squirt video feeds down the line with a ping of less than one millisecond and its patented video compression technology is supposed to be blazing fast, with video compression taking just one millisecond to process.

As excited as I am, the crippling lag that we Aussies can't seem to escape means technology like this is still too good to be true. However, in a perfect world technology like this means no installing, it means cross-platform compatibility and in general takes the streaming media concept that's already heavily in use for film and TV to a whole new level.

Eventually Australia will catch up to the rest of the world in terms of internet speed and the rest of the world will start to recognise that it's important to install dedicated servers (Both for an OnLive type service and multiplayer games in general) in Australia. But until then, my response to a revolution like this is: It sounds great in theory, but theory won't help me get my game on.