In the future, aside from wearing digital socks and eating our meals in pill-form, we won’t own our own consoles as much as subscribe to remote super-servers that effectively ‘stream’ our gaming entertainment back to our living rooms in real-time.

This is the premise of ‘Gaikai’ – a new ‘cloud’ gaming service that’s currently in development by Dave Perry and his team. And if you think the very idea is somewhat improbable and likely to be fraught with problems of latency and general rubbishness, well, prepare to eat your thoughts as a new closed beta test opens in Europe.

“Our closed beta has two goals,” says Perry. “#1 is to bring our servers to their knees so we can choose the final configuration before we start ordering large quantities of them.”

”Goal #2 is to test older computers. We've had lots of emails from people describing their computers and 99% of them have ample performance. Remember you don't even need a 3D card to see a 3D game run on our service. I know this is strangely counter to what people expect, but we actually want to get plenty of basic office-grade XP machines testing so we can make sure we can reach the widest audience possible.”

And that’s it in a nutshell. You don’t need any special equipment to take part and there are no massive software downloads to endure. You just sign up to the beta, wait for your invitation to play and start playing right from your desktop. That’s the theory, anyway.

Intrigued? You should be! Sign up at http://www.gaikai.com/beta/. You’d better be quick about it too, as places will be limited.