The goal is photorealistic cloud gaming, with Unity and Unreal the first platforms.

Otoy jumped into this week’s Game Developers Conference with several announcements. First, the company says it is extending its network of game developers interested in using its technology. The company says it has a program to help game developers use Otoy to enable cloud computing to deliver games.

The company seems to be concentrating on the Unreal and Unity game engines first, and so far, the company did not get specific about who the developers are.

Next up Otoy announces it has merged Brigade and OctaneRender so they share the same code base. As a result, says Otoy, 3D scenes complete with materials, lighting, and objects rendered in OctaneRender can be loaded into Brigade for use in game development or other interactive applications.

Brigade, in turn, is now compatible with 15 leading modeling programs through OctaneRender plug-ins. There are plugins available for ArchiCAD, Blender, Daz Studio, Lightwave, Poser, Rhino, Modo, 3ds Max, AutoCAD, Cinema 4D, Inventor, Maya, Revit, and Softimage, with SketchUp and Carrara coming up.

Brigade is an API that can be used instead of Microsoft Direct or OpenGL graphics to serve as a back end to process graphics. The result, claims Otoy, is images that can render in fractions of a second for consumers on any class of hardware.

Coming up next is the key part of Otoy’s game plan. The company will make Otoy Brigade available through Amazon’s EC2 cloud via AMIs (Amazon Machine Instances). The company is planning to make Brigade available in the second half of 2014 to allow developers to test and develop next-generation games.

What do we think?

The company is building the pieces and connecting them, but all the use of “next generation” can and should be read as “not yet.” There is a lot of enthusiasm about how rich content can be interactively accessed and used in the cloud, but so far, we’re seeing demos and not deployment.