iPhone Games Coming to Your TV?

Recently, the fantastic Erica Sadun of Ars Technica uncovered a little undocumented iPhone OS SDK nugget that showed the OS had some hooks to TV output. Turns out this MPTVOutWindow class gives an iPhone OS application the ability to direct it's output to the TV when connected with the Apple A/V video cables while getting input from the device accelerometer still. Effectively this could turn you iPhone or iPod Touch into an input device and TV game system. But it must be pointed out that this is still totally undocumented and completely unsupported by Apple at the current time.

So what's the result? Erica contacted Freeverse and asked them to play around with it. They took their killer Moto Chaser (App Store) game and modified it to work with this new output class. Here's what Moto Chaser looks like played on your TV and controlled and connected to an iPod Touch.

So what does this mean? Why is Apple making this available? Well I doubt we'll see this officially announced anytime soon. How will Apple use this? A dedicated gaming device? For use on the Apple TV using an iPhone simulator like software application to allow iPhone OS apps to run on your TV screen? Who knows what Apple has planned, they are as always tight lipped.

[ Source: Ars Technica ]