Just as Netflix has taken movies and TV shows and made them easily streamable, the concept of “cloud gaming” – or essentially, of streaming video games – has been brewing in the minds of gaming industry figures for awhile now. After all, if players could stream games through their consoles, rather than downloading them as huge files or purchasing physical, disc-based games, then everyone would be happy. Players would have the opportunity to play more games, and game companies could cut down on manufacturing costs.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with video game streaming: lag time. Video streaming can often lag, particularly if there is a poor internet connection, but when it comes to games, the problem is much more substantial. With movies or TV shows, you are streaming a pre-existing medium with only one possible future outcome. With games, though, you interact with a virtual world where you are creating and influencing the events of the medium as you go forward.

In other words, games are difficult to stream because for every player action, the game has to load different pieces of information. But according to a recent article from Gizmodo, there may soon be a way for games to stream and load information in a quicker and more intelligent manner – thereby cutting down on lag times.

The solution is called “DeLorean,” and it has been developed as part of a Microsoft Research project. DeLorean – which is, of course, named after the car used as a time machine in the Back to the Future films – is a so-called “speculative execution system” that is capable of cutting down on game streaming lag times by essentially predicting what players will do in certain game situations.

By predicting a player’s next move before it even happens, DeLorean is able to tell the game to load a certain video response before an action in the game directly necessitates that response. Therefore, when the player makes their move, the game has already loaded the necessary response to that move, thereby cutting down on load times and eliminating lags.

With DeLorean, game streams could feasibly become a viable alternative to games whose data is stored locally. Of course, the concept is a new one, and Microsoft would need to revamp it a bit before including it with an Xbox console. Right now, for instance, DeLorean needs to send an awful lot of data in order to work, which means that it is only really viable with extremely high bandwidth internet connections. With some tweaking, though, DeLorean could easily become a new standard for streaming games.