Now available: Microphone passthrough

This feature is available to users on release 150–90 or later. You can find more information about app updates in our Changelog.

Today, we’re rolling out the ability to pass your client microphone through to a host machine with the Virtual USB driver installed. Here at Parsec, it is our mission to make you forget that you’re working or playing games remotely — and adding a feature that makes things easier to do brings us closer to achieving that mission.

With mic passthrough, remote collaboration will be seamless, making it feel like you’re working directly at your desk in the office. Remote meetings can be joined with voice over Parsec, and Film editors can lay reference voice over remotely. And if you’re playing games with friends in other places, you can use in-game voice chat to easily have your conversations.

At launch, mic passthrough can be done from a Windows or macOS client and you must have the 0.2.5.0 Virtual USB driver installed on the host. Currently, mic passthrough can only be delivered to a Windows host.

How to set up Microphone Passthrough on Parsec

Follow these 3 easy steps to setup Mic passthrough using Parsec:

1.) Head into User Settings and click on Experimental Settings.

2.) Within the Experimental menu you’ll see three settings for mic passthrough:

On the Client machine:

Microphone passthrough: Select On to pass your client microphone through to your host machine. Once you have turned it On you will be able to select your microphone in the next setting.

Microphone Selection: Allows you to choose which microphone you want to use. With the option Default, if you disconnect and reconnect your microphone it will remain connected as your default microphone.

On the Host machine:

Microphone: You can choose between, On, Off, and Persistent. When On is selected, Parsec will create a temporary microphone. When Persistent is selected, Parsec will create a microphone that will remain on indefinitely unless you manually select the option Off.

3.) Double check audio settings on both the host and the client. Sometimes these settings will disrupt Parsec’s microphone passthrough.

What’s improved with client microphone passthrough?

Collaborate efficiently with distributed team members

The days of using a third-party application on top of Parsec to communicate with colleagues are over! Now you can make a call in Microsoft Teams or huddle on Slack directly from your client computer and your teammates will be able to hear you as clearly as before. Use any communication tools downloaded on your host computer like Zoom, Slack, Teams, and more just how you’re used to.

Play and talk with friends while playing games remotely

Co-op with your friends and talk with them directly through in-game voice chat with Parsec’s mic passthrough. This means you will no longer need to use an additional app or reroute your audio to talk with your friends. For gamers who connect multiple people into one Parsec stream, please note that only the host owner’s microphone will be passed from client to host.

Mic passthrough is available for all versions of Parsec — give it a try! If you have questions, visit the support article for additional details. We hope this update makes it a little easier for you to collaborate with team members and chat and play games with your friends from anywhere.

Now available: Microphone passthrough was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s dangerous to work alone. Take Parsec!

You may not be on a quest to save the world, but setting up a new system can feel just as daunting. Let’s break it down into easy steps.

• Step 1: what even is this Parsec for Teams thing?
• Step 2: join us in the lobby at noon for a guided tour of the Parsec app.
• Step 3: get to know the admin panel, your new secret weapon.
• Step 4: users are in place, now set up the machines.
• Step 5: choose the right security options for your org.
• Bonus level: optimization, pro tips, and Parsec hacks.
• Optional power-up: set up the Parsec high performance relay, available in Parsec for Enterprise.

Side quest: industry-specific settings

Do you work in these spaces? We have tips for you!

• Artists & animation
• Testing, QA & events
• Video editing

Side quest: program-specific settings

Are you a superuser for any of these apps? We’ve got some cheat-codes to help you optimize your settings:

• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Cinema 4D
• DaVinci Resolve
• Final Cut
• Maya
• Revit

Hey! Listen!

If you need help ASAP, email our team of glowing, spherical support fairies at support@parsec.app. Your message will magically generate a support ticket and we will respond to you as soon as we can.

There’s no “i” in team. Or Parsec. But there is in “Hi, welcome to Parsec for Teams! was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thanks to a little piece of software you may not even realize you have on your computer, the PC vs console argument is basically obsolete. Using Xbox Remote Play, you can stream your Xbox One, Series X, or Series S to your machine. Then, using Parsec, you can stream Xbox titles to your friends, even if they don’t have an Xbox themselves.

Don’t have a squad ready to play? Avoid the stranger danger and draft the Parsec community. Just use the Arcade to make your session public.

Enough talk; make with the easy instructions!

Step 1: Install Parsec. In the unlikely event you don’t have Parsec yet, download it here.

Step 2: Install Xbox Remote Play. You may have this on your PC already, but if not, here’s where to find it.

Step 3: Profit. Err, turn on your Xbox, run the Remote Play app and connect to your console.

SIDE QUEST: Initiating Xbox Remote Play can automatically turn on the Xbox, saving you a step, but you need to enable the setting first. It doesn’t help you right now, but it’s very convenient for the future. Here’s what you do.

▪ Press the Xbox button on your controller

▪ Select ‘Profile and System’

▪ Select ‘Settings’

▪ Select ‘Devices and Connections’

▪ Select ‘Remote Features’

▪ From the remote features settings, scroll down to ‘Power Mode’

▪ Select ‘Instant On’

Step 4: Open Parsec and host a session from either the Arcade tab or the Computers tab. Send the big link to anybody you want to connect directly to you. If you use the Arcade, you can make the session public to allow anybody to join.

Step 5: Play! Once everyone is connected you’ll all begin seeing the same screen at the same time. All that’s left to do is choose the Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, or Xbox Game Pass title you want to play, have your guests plug in their controllers, and have fun!

Xbox on PC on Parsec was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Parsec, high security is as important as near-zero latency. We want you to experience a seamless connection and feel safe while you do so. To show that we are committed to this promise, we are proud to announce that we are SOC2 Type 1 certified!

We also value transparency, and know that information security thrives this way. Here we dive into some of the steps we take to ensure that your experience and data are safe and secure.

How does Parsec keep my data secure?

Your peer-to-peer stream never passes through the Parsec infrastructure. After our backend authenticates and authorizes a connection between your peers, your data flows directly between those peers. We cannot access it, and the data is encrypted.

And now for some tech speak: the data shared between your peers is encrypted using industry-standard raw AES-GCM. AES (128-bit keys) encrypts the data, and GCM is used for integrity checks.

What kind of data encryption does Parsec use?

Our system uses IP addresses, usernames, and email addresses to broker authentication and authorization. (This data is also included in your team’s security audit logs, which are accessible via the Parsec for Teams admin panel and API). Data is encrypted at rest using industry-standard AES-256 encryption and encrypted in transit using a minimum of TLSv1.2 with carefully audited cipher suites.

What are Parsec’s security certifications?

As of February 15 2023, we are happy to announce that we have achieved SOC 2 Type 1 certification! A copy of our report is available after signing an MNDA with Unity. Our infrastructure also complies with AWS Foundational Security Best Practices and CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark.

What additional product security measures does Parsec take?

External security testing

We nurture a healthy security bug bounty program, encouraging the best security researcher talent on the internet to continuously test our products and identify problem areas. To level up our testing, we hire an accredited pentesting company to penetration test our product at least once a year.

In addition to these external tests, we make it easy for our user base to report any security issues by providing an easy contact form for our security team on our site as well as an active social media presence.

Infrastructure security

The smaller the attack surface on our infrastructure, the easier it is to guard. We back that up with systems for security defense, detection, and visibility.

Secure software development lifecycle

We embed security into each step of our development lifecycle. At the design step, we use Security Reviews, Rapid Risk Assessments, Threat Models, and Abuser Stories (user stories to prevent hacking). These all help secure our designs from the beginning.

During the implementation phases, we use industry leading systems to scan code for security vulnerabilities. On top of that, we use security platforms to detect and protect our software from possible supply-chain attacks or third-party vulnerabilities in any dependencies.

After a feature is complete, our security team performs yet another security test and review. After this, we introduce the new feature to our pentesting program to get additional security test coverage.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions or want to learn more about a specific topic, please drop us a line.

— — -

Last updated: February 17, 2023

Just how secure is Parsec? was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Parsec and BeBop Technology are thrilled to announce we’ve partnered to integrate Parsec’s high-performance remote protocol into BeBop’s powerful remote virtual post-production platform. We went ahead and predicted all of your questions and are presenting answers to them, below.

What the heck is Parsec?

Parsec is high performance remote access technology built for the creative industries. Parsec’s modern, peer-to-peer interactive streaming blurs any physical distance between you and a host computer, giving you full control to work whenever inspiration strikes.

Parsec for Teams lets you deploy Parsec across your organization, giving anyone working remotely instant, seamless access to their hardware, whenever they need it.

And what the heck is BeBop?

BeBop is the industry-leading choice for virtual and remote content creation, collaboration, and post-production by some of the biggest names in entertainment, lifestyle, sports, and news.

So what does this partnership mean?

BeBop has integrated Parsec into its cloud brokering technology, so that you can access a high-powered editing workstation from anywhere, at any time. BeBop’s platform takes care of all the complex workstation provisioning and licensing so that you can just click a button and get to work.

Not sure what we’re talking about? Check out this video.

Anyone with a BeBop subscription can run any creative tool that fits into your creative workflow using your existing hardware licenses. That includes all the apps in the Adobe Creative Cloud like Premiere Pro, Affect Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator, and VFX software like Nuke, Maya, Davinci Resolve, or Blender.

BeBop Rocket (optimized for the cloud!) also lets you move data back and forth super-fast and gives you the power to manage your projects.

With the BeBop and Parsec connection, collaboration is a native part of the experience. You can stream sessions for review and approval a bunch of different ways with BeBop Rev. A Rev Live stream can play out directly from Premiere Pro in a browser, and lets a reviewer drop comments and notes right on the stream — or even hop into an audio conference! Rev Notes also lets you send an asynchronous stream to a reviewer so they can check out your cuts, effects, or graphics on their schedule. Rev Max enables high quality, multi-channel audio, multi-protocol, real-time review and approval.

OK, I use Parsec and I’m interested. Now what?

First, you’ll need a Parsec for Teams account. You can sign up your organization right here or learn more by getting in touch with the Parsec Team.

And you’ll obviously need a BeBop account. You can get that right here. Parsec for Teams gives your organization

Once you’re signed up, you’ll have access to BeBop’s award-winning production customer success team. We not only provide you with the awesome compute power of BeBop, but also bring out our editors and graphic artists to onboard your creatives and make them comfortable with BeBop and Parsec.

BeBop Technology and Parsec partner to simplify virtual post-production was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Parsec, gaming is in our DNA. We were built to capture that feeling of sitting on the couch side by side — Ryu vs Ken. This meant low latency was a must, flawless controller support a given, and gorgeous visuals were to be expected. Challenge accepted.

It wasn’t long before devs noticed that the same features that make Parsec perfect for gaming make it ideal for game development. As studios embrace distributed work and cloud game development, Parsec has become an integral part of the entire process, from ideation to release.

Playtesting is particularly critical when creating fun, immersive, and challenging video games. Parsec ensures that testers experience your game, not the tool being used to showcase it. Testers are given a high-performance, high-fidelity experience as if they were on location. And, in turn, studios receive the high-quality feedback they need to iterate and improve.

Jumpstarting virtual playtesting during the pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Xbox Research needed a way to continue delivering their games to testers without physically bringing them into the playtest and usability labs in Redmond, WA. Without high performance, precision, and a consistent environment, remote gameplay wouldn’t provide the feedback needed to produce substantial research.

As Xbox Research began evaluating solutions to transition from local playtesting to a scaled, virtual, worldwide solution, they found that Parsec provided gameplay that felt the most similar to an in-person experience. Its high-quality visuals and support for accurate, low-latency gamepad control ensured that all gamers had consistent experiences. Xbox Research saw the value Parsec provided during Halo Infinite remote playtests and decided to implement Parsec for testing of the next Age of Empires release.

They’ve since scaled their virtual playtesting to over 20 playtests of different games across 120 workstations running Parsec concurrently to meet studio demands.

Changing event experiences with remote press demos

Similarly, Ubisoft faced problems sharing their games with the press during the peak of work from home. Their team developed the idea to hold their own virtual conference, Ubisoft Forward, but they needed technology that could accurately showcase their cross-platform releases, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Watch Dogs: Legion.

Thanks to Parsec, Ubisoft Forward was able to deliver of their highly anticipated releases 1500+ virtual demos to media professionals in 30 countries — an increase of more than double what they’d previously achieved at major in-person conferences. Parsec’s ease of use, responsiveness, and high security met the criteria Ubisoft had set for the event, and it will continue to change the way they share experiences at events moving forward.

Embracing distributed work for innovative game development

Many game studios have opted to maintain hybrid work models for their distributed teams as they return to office. SEGA’s Creative Assembly needed a secure solution to support their internal game testing and playthrough processes.

Creative Assembly chose Parsec for Teams Enterprise for its high-fidelity streaming and built-in security features. Encrypted peer-to-peer connections, enforced SSO, and watermarked game streams ensured the Creative Assembly team can remotely coordinate sessions involving developers, QA teams, and external testers while IP remains safe in the office.

The future of virtual playtesting

As Parsec continues to power playtesting and research for distributed game studios, our team is working hard to make sure you have support for the processes and peripherals you’re using.

We’re excited to announce that Parsec now has full DualSense PS5 controller support, enabling immersive remote gameplay that feels like you’re sitting directly at your PlayStation®5. This release enables PS5 game developers to accurately test their games virtually, thanks to support for:

• Adaptive triggers for force and tension interactions
• Haptic feedback to simulate rumble and vibrations
• Gyroscope for motion sensor control
• Touchpad support
• All standard buttons and analog sticks

This release goes beyond DualSense controllers. The foundations set here enable Parsec to more readily support advanced peripherals in the future. With Parsec for Teams, you remain ready to test at scale and get feedback from a more diverse audience.

Power your virtual playtesting with Parsec. Start a 14-day free trial of Parsec for Teams today.

Parsec enables feedback from anywhere with virtual playtesting was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The workplace as we know it has also been permanently disrupted. Returning to a fully in-office environment is about as likely as the grubby self-serve olive table making a comeback at grocery stores. With remote or at least hybrid work becoming a right more than a privilege, employers who aren’t on board have found their numbers dwindling.

What’s driving the transformation to distributed teams?

In short: technology, employee preference, and economics. COVID-19 demolished the long-held belief that being in the same physical space increases collaboration and innovation. By now, we know that packing more people into tighter spaces creates a noisy, distracting, and stressful environment that actually reduces overall productivity. And don’t get us started on the commute to said cubicle farm.

We all love a good team brainstorm with our trusty whiteboard, but it no longer represents coworker collaboration. Even before the pandemic, businesses adopted cloud-based productivity suites, storage, and remote access technology like Parsec. People could share and retrieve large files, stay connected with their team, and contribute to the same project simultaneously without ever taking off their noise-canceling headphones. Ironically, the closer that people were forced to sit physically, the further apart they became functionally.

But there’s been a major exception to the remote work trend: animators, game developers, video editors, scientists, and engineers — creative teams that depend on GPU-intensive processing power, speciality hardware, and petabytes of local storage. Legacy remote-access technology simply couldn’t handle their specialized needs, which meant that they needed to be on-site with their team to work and create.

Parsec changes all that.

Creative teams don’t have to live in the studio anymore.

All those brilliant creators we idolize: are they really shut out of that beautiful remote work lifestyle? Not if Parsec has anything to do with it.

If this sounds like Klingon to you, let’s break it down. Until recently, if you worked with large, graphic-intensive files, you were tied to a studio that had the necessary storage capacity and processing power. And while you still need that hardware somewhere, using Parsec for remote access means you don’t need to be anywhere near it.

For VFX artists, illustrators, and post-production designers, that means the
freedom to work wherever they feel most inspired — whether that’s at home or halfway around the world. For engineering teams that means a more efficient allocation of processing power, and the ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously. In fact, 86% of creatives working through Parsec report saving time working remotely, and 57% are saving more than an hour every single day. For the business, all that time means happier employees, lower turnover, and reduced overhead.

Testing, user research, and QA can happen anywhere, with anyone.

User research and product testing is another resource-intensive process, particularly for game developers. Console games need to be tested on specialized dev kits to create a realistic experience; players and developers must also be on-site to ensure privacy and security. This made testing impossible during the pandemic, but now that social distancing is less of a concern, are these workers required to be in the office every day as well?

Not at all. Game developers can host Parsec directly on development machines, allowing clients to stream the build from thousands of miles away without any loss in quality. Developers, players, and the media can watch the gameplay live from a third location or record the feed to review later.

Leave large files where they are and avoid versioning conflicts.

One of the biggest friction points dealing with large files like game builds and VFX renders is the simple act of sharing the file among team members. Uploading and downloading to a shared drive from a local machine can take hours, even with a fast connection. And maintaining local copies is a recipe for version conflicts that have to be manually resolved.

With Parsec, teams can all share access to the same remote machine or render farm, which eliminates the need to move files between workstations and ensures the master file stays clean. 28% of Parsec for Teams users report saving significant amounts of time in avoiding these idle upload, download, and rendering times.

Businesses need to get with the hybrid work program — and stay with it.

Creative firms see the benefits and potential of distributed teams, and the smart ones are embracing it. Distributed teams that can access their equipment through Parsec can work on multiple projects asynchronously, allowing the same developer, colorist, or sound engineer to work on multiple projects simultaneously — or on 24 hour rotation. Now that’s what peak efficiency looks like.

Industry research firm Gartner estimates that remote work will allow organizations to hire and support 40% more people in the same amount of office space. Parsec also allows companies that depend on render farms to move that storage off-site into lower cost space away from the main office. 53% of Parsec for Teams admins are already reducing office space to support long term remote work.

Remote work boosts employee satisfaction, with 37% of employees saying they’d change jobs to one that allows remote work some or all of the time. Businesses that build distributed teams also benefit from a larger talent pool offshore, where labor costs are less than half what they are in the United States. And 73% of Parsec for Teams administrators report having already started diversifying their talent.

It’s clear that the creative industries are forever changed by their newfound ability to operate remotely. As the world transitions to this reality of flexible workplaces, remote-first cultures, and unlocked efficiencies, Parsec is committed to connecting teams to each other and their work.

The Great Resignation has spoken: the hybrid workplace is here to stay was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Security sure looks different when you go from the corporate office to home. No showing a badge to get in, nosy coworkers sneaking glances at your screen, or strangers who might make off with your things. But if you think the worst security breach that can happen is Mittens tap dancing on your keyboard, you’d be wrong.

Working from home is no excuse to let your guard down — digital or otherwise. See how you stack up when it comes to securing your home office with these handy tips.

1 — Avoid common scams (and the really clever ones too)

Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and scammers. We know what you’re thinking — you’re far too clever to fall for a scam. We believe you! But in a workplace where every communication is digital, a falsified email, text, or chat can sneak past your defenses.

Scammers constantly evolve their tricks. Even classics like “your boss texts you to buy a paycheck’s worth of gift cards” can seem legit when your communication method has changed from shouting across the room to texting.

Stay informed of current scams with a reputable source like USA.gov’s Common Scams and Frauds. Although it’s user-curated, Reddit’s r/scams subreddit is enlightening — you can learn about new scams in real time as victims post. As we learned from G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

2 — Make your home your fortress

You’re home — what’s the worst that could happen? Honestly, you don’t want to find out. Don’t get complacent with security standards just because you work in comfy pants.

– Secure your home network. The FTC has some great advice on how to do this. At the very least, make sure your router and network are password protected — and not with the passwords that came out of the box.

– Comply with your company’s security standards, even if IT isn’t checking up on you from afar.

– Use strong two-factor authentication and consider a hardware authentication device like YubiKey. (And store said key in a different location than your computer).

– Have strong passwords for everything, and consider changing them every 30 days.

– Regularly install updates to software and operating systems. Set a realistic weekly update time on your machine and don’t defer the update.

– Use a sliding webcam cover. If cyber criminals hack your webcam, they see nothing. Take that, bad guys.

– Beware the overshare. Use a digital Zoom background or carefully curate what your coworkers can see during a huddle. (This goes for both sensitive assets and dirty desks littered with old coffee cups and used tissues).

– Keep prying eyes and pesky hands (or paws) off your data by logging out of your workstation at the end of the day.

– Enable your device’s Find My Computer, full disk encryption, and the ability to perform remote wipes. Prepare for the possibility of burglary or theft, however unlikely it may seem.

3 — Be cautious when you’re working in public

When we say you can use Parsec work from anywhere, we mean it. But the flexibility to work remotely might put you in some questionable situations.– If you are using a public or untrusted network, ensure that you are using a Point to Point VPN to tunnel all of your traffic to and from the office.

– Seriously, don’t work on a public network. But if you absolutely must, check out the FTC’s tips on staying safe while using a public wifi network beforehand.

– Don’t handle confidential assets or sensitive information if others can see you working — even if you have a tinted privacy screen. This seems like a no-brainer, but it can be tempting to WFCCIP (Work From Chic Café In Paris).

– Never leave devices in your car or unattended in public. Not for a quick nip into the shop or a dash to the bathroom (even if you ask someone to watch it). They will not be there when you return.

– Separate work and play. It’s tempting to use your work devices when you’re taking a break, but non-work activity can open the door to security threats or questionable websites.

Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security just because you’re working from your happy place. You’re likely connected to a literal worldwide web, and you might find out the hard way that some spiders are venomous.

Three security rules every remote worker should follow was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello, it’s your hyperactive brain talking. The part of you that juggles so much you rival Akuma’s heavy Goshoryuken attack. You use Parsec to embrace remote work (or its more social cousin, the hybrid workplace), but something is keeping you from reaching maximum efficiency. It’s not your fault; the laundry basket’s full and the washer is right there (might as well run a load). And pop leftover takeout in the microwave. You wonder if the Thai place near the old office is still around. One trip down the Google rabbit hole and it’s been… an hour? Two hours?

Remote work is not all pajama pants and puppy kisses. If you struggle getting in the zone and staying there, here are some tips that work for us.

Do not work from the couch or kitchen table

To get in the zone, it helps to go to a literal zone. If you have an office, spare room, or particularly large closet under the stairs, awesome. If you don’t, create a workspace using room partitions or curtains. Your humble office should have everything you need to be productive — like a desk big enough to hold all your screens, ergonomic peripherals, and a comfy chair.

One thing — no gaming or taking breaks in your “office”. You’re training your brain to recognize that sitting here means work, which means focus, which means getting $h!t done.

Schedule your day

Do you have a skewed sense of time? Join the club! Master temporal order with your calendar. Block out specific hours for heads-down work, and silence your Slack notifications while you focus.

If you find yourself taking long breaks (or no breaks at all), schedule those too. Set a timer for 15 minutes and take a walk around the block. We hear sunlight is good for you (in small doses).

Minimize distractions with noise-cancelling headphones

Remember how noise-cancelling headphones helped you ignore chatty coworkers? Well, use em to ignore barking dogs, construction noise, or chatty roommates. Play music or ASMR if that helps you focus; use the noise canceling to create a quiet environment if sound distracts you. So you can have The Sound of Silence, or the sound of silence.

This above all: to thine own self be true

Now that you’ve read our tips you’re a hyper-efficient remote work machine, right? Alas, there will come a day where you can’t string together 3 words that make sense, and you feel bad again. My friend, cut yourself some slack. You’re only human… unless you’re really 3 raccoons in a trench coat on the internet.

Remote work tips for the easily distracted was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce Microsoft Azure is partnering with Parsec to give creators building and utilizing real-time 3D applications (RT3D) one-click deployment of their industry-leading remote access technology through Azure.

Parsec is an ultra low-latency, high-fidelity remote desktop that supports a dizzying array of input devices, including gamepads and drawing tablets, connecting teams to their projects wherever they are, whenever they want. With Azure’s 60+ datacenter regions, more than any other cloud provider, we’re making it even easier for geographically distributed studios to deploy pre-configured virtual machines to tackle projects mild to wild.

“Parsec already allows tens of thousands of creators to make incredible things and stay productive wherever they are working, whenever they want, across any device. Our partnership with Azure allows these businesses to deliver this kind of experience to more individuals, and to globally distribute interactive content, in just a few clicks.”

– Benjy Boxer, co-founder and General Manager, Parsec

As more and more people work on RT3D projects, access to hardware has become a real challenge. The 2.7 billion smartphones and 2 billion computers in the world is beyond the scale of the 500 million computers capable of running graphically-intense work. Parsec and Azure make these high-performance machines available to individuals with an internet connection and a low-end laptop, tablet, and phone, empowering teams to connect and stream these applications whenever they’re needed.

“The transition to fully remote work hindered Xbox Research’s (XR) ability to run in-person user research for Halo Infinite. However, Parsec’s low latency, high fidelity streaming solution allowed us to conduct studies remotely at a critical time in the game’s development. This research generated meaningful and actionable insights that the team used to improve important features on the runway to launch. Since cutting our teeth on Halo Infinite, XR has scaled this capability using Parsec to conduct research across other titles within Xbox Game Studios.”

– Jonathan Winkle, Xbox Researcher

By giving game creators access to pre-configured high-performance virtual machines, anyone with an internet connection and any device can benefit from:

• Performance: Parsec gives you access to your hardware in seconds with near zero latency and unparalleled input accuracy when you plug in a keyboard, mouse, tablet, or gamepad. And video streams look silky smooth, with 60FPS UHD interactive desktop video in vivid color on up to 3 monitors.
• Instant collaboration: Team members can collaborate in a single click, with features like shared workstations available to team members on demand, and guest access so freelancers, journalists, or other outside users can securely collaborate with you.
• Flexible display options: With full support for up to three monitors, virtual displays, improved color mode, and an endless set of supported resolutions, Parsec enables you to personalize your remote work environment.
• Precision gamepad control: With near zero input lag, Parsec gives you full fidelity control over games. Plug in a pad, WACOM tablet, or a keyboard and mouse, and it just works.
• Security: Parsec locks down computers with encrypted peer-to-peer (P2P) connections, so that your team can connect directly (without your data ever touching our servers). Deploy Parsec across your org with confidence: enforce SSO, set session durations, view audit trails, manage via RESTful API, & even watermark streams, with admin features designed for enterprise teams.

Teams can get started today in the Azure Marketplace, game creators can now access one-click deployment of pre-configured Windows Virtual Machines (VMs) that connect to NVIDIA GPUs. This pre-built desktop image includes Microsoft Visual Studio, DirectX, and the Game Developer Kit, optimized for creating real-time 3D applications. Deployment is easy, with most teams up and running in under 5 minutes.

Learn more about how to deploy here.

Parsec’s low-latency, high-performance remote access can be deployed on Azure with one click was originally published in Blog | Game, Work, and Play Together From Anywhere | Parsec on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.