Citrix announces "USB Redirection to the Cloud" at VMware 2015-- essentially a means to allow input peripherals connected to local devices to run on virtual desktops with little to no latency.
The use of drawing tablets and styluses on virtual desktops was previously thought impossible on virtual desktops due to cloud deployment latency. However as virtual desktops get powerful enough to run graphics applications USB redirection to the cloud sets to beat such issues, and as seen at VMworld appears to do exactly that.
A demo on the Nvidia stand saw a digital artist working with a Wacom tablet on Autodesk Mudbox running on a Citrix ZenDesktop session, all with near real-time performance.
Such capability appears to be handy for arts and design applications, but it can also be useful for signature pads on credit card machines, with signature pad data being sent to secured datacentres rather than local machines.
Citrix says USB Redirection to the Cloud will be part of an unspecified future XenDesktop and XenApp release.
Go Citrix and Nvidia Demo Wacom Pen in the Cloud at VMworld 2015
