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Move over, AirPlay, and keep your closed ecosystem and pricey adapters to yourself, Wi-Di; there's a new streaming display solution coming to town. The Wi-Fi Alliance plans on finalizing the Miracast wireless display standard in the next few months, enabling cord-and dongle-free streaming to monitors and TVs, and a big new partner just announced it was onboard: Nvidia. Even better, Big Green's bringing the Tegra 3 processor along for the ride, which could help to quickly spur adoption of the standard.
Miracast operates similarly to Wi-Fi Direct, allowing Miracast-compatible devices to connect directly and bypass the need to piggyback on a working Wi-Fi network. Several companies have hopped onboard the Miracast train, but Nvidia's positioning its Tegra 3 tablets and smartphones as a unique offering thanks to the mobile processor's excellent CPU/GPU combo chops.
From Nvidia's blog post:
At the heart of every Tegra chip is a high-performance CPU and GPU, which means you can use Tegra to play amazing games on the big screen. We’re not just talking about flinging Angry Birds but racing a super-charged jet ski in the game Riptide THD and playing heart-pounding first-person shooter games like Shadowgun THD. You can even take mobile gaming to the next level by pairing a Tegra device with a console controller for the ultimate wireless display experience.
Nvidia's also striving to keep Tegra's Miracast solution low-latency. Latency woes have plagued Intel's Wi-Di.
Tablet on the table, Shadowgun on the big screen and controller in hand, with no wires or adapters anywhere to be found? Sounds like a good time to us. Nvidia has a whitepaper outlining the basic principles behind its Miracast support, but the details are scarce; the company promises to release more info when the Miracast standard becomes ratified as an official spec.
Comments are closed on this article
Belboz99
July 28, 2012 at 9:13am
This tech would be better used for multi-display functionality...
In the demo, the display is simply a mirror of the primary display, but what if you could stream as a 2nd display?
Think about it, open up your tablet, notepad, or ultra-thin, load up a movie onto the wireless display, send out a status update or check your messages on the local display, cool right?
Biggest concern is that the mobile device would have to be capable of rendering HD content on two displays, without any hit on performance, especially for a movie or such.
If the audio is bundled with the video signal, another great usage would be to stream music from your mobile onto a HTPC, and into a receiver for full stereo sound while at home, without requiring any physical connections.
Those would be my uses, mirroring a mobile display is nice, but limited.
