With E3 came the announcement of the Wii U? For those familiar with it, one of the big draws of the device is being able to stream Wii U games from the console to it's controller, with a tablet like screen. I love this concept because with family, sitting in front of a console is getting harder and harder to do and there are some great PS3 games I'd love to catch up on. This brings me to my questions - is there or does anyone know of a solution where I could stream the game video (or TV for that matter) to the iPad? The iPad seems like a great tool to accomplish this, but I haven't found much in the way of anyone actually accomplishing something like this. Any thoughts?
Sadly, I can't offer a solution, but I feel that the Wii U and streaming to the iPad are somewhat different situations. I'm guessing the link between the Wii and the new controller is strictly between themselves, with no real interruption besides the occasional dips in speed. If you were streaming from TV to iPad (since Xbox to iPad seem less likely), you'd need some sort of converter, and relay it to your home WiFi, which is significantly more sporadic. Then there's latency. Good idea, I just don't see it working out just yet.
I like the idea as well. Dont see either sony or microsoft supporting it natively atleast for the iPad. They may support such functionality with their respective tablets though (the upcoming android Sony tablets, windows tablets). But thats just technical possibilities. Who knows if Sony or MS will even bother with such niche functionality. For ipad, our best bet would be using a wireless hdmi transmitter (easily available but quite expensive) plugged into 360/PS3 and then some other hardware attachment for iPad which enables it to receive and play such content. Unfortunately nothing like this exist afaik. Routing your video from PS3 to PC and then to your ipad using an app like splashtop will work but the lag will be way too much.
The only "real" way for this would be an emulator. There's already people using the ps3 and wii controller to play n64 and ps1 games, but it will be a while before the ipad screen can handle bigger games like ps3/360. And splashtop is the best bet for streaming, but that's kind of a lot of work.
Funny, before I went to bed last night, I tried using Splashtop on my iPad to try just this. It has a neat option of changing to a "smooth" interface which lowers the resolution, but makes the response a lot faster. I tried this setup with DOOM on the PC. While latency time was a lot better than I expected, there was still about 1/4 to 1/2 a second of lag between input and screen response. It's not bad and might actually be akin to experiences playing on a slower connection online, but it's not worth dropping the extra cash for a capture card for the PS3 to PC interface. I'm going to try another test with a more up to date PC title using my Xbox 360 to Windows wireless connection. I think this will be closer to what the end solution would be so I'll post back on those results. Ideally I wish that Apple would put out some sort of iPad dock that would include physical controls and standardized API for developers to use. That day will never come to fruition so I might just have to break down and get a Wii U next year at some point.
