Call it Slingbox for games. Spawn Labs lets you take a console game and play it over the web on a laptop or a computer.
As the Slingbox does with video, you can place shift your games and play them in high-definition on any computer, said David Wilson, chief executive at the Austin-based company. While the game is actually running on a console, you can interact with it and view it on a display on a far away laptop, as long as you have a broadband connection.
You have to buy a $199 Spawn HD-720 box to make it work. Inside the box are digital signal processing chips that can take game images, convert them into video, and play them on any computer screen. You interact with the game and send the signals back to the game console, which then sends the results of the interaction back to your screen. To play, you put a game in the console and leave it on. Then you can log into the Spawn Labs box from any machine and play it.
Here’s our video interview with Wilson at his booth at the Game Developers Conference.
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