Developer Ben Dodson has uncovered some cool stuff inside iOS5 that can turn your AppleTV and iPad2 into a wireless games console setup.
Thanks to the new display mirroring feature (currently supported by iPad 2), apps don’t have to have AirPlay functionality built in before you stream what they’re displaying to your AppleTV. Any app will work.
But there’s something else: any app that uses Apple’s TV-out functionality can now wirelessly send a secondary display image to your AppleTV. Until now, the only way to make this work was by using a cable.
Ben made a test app to demonstrate, one that sends Google Maps to his TV while creating a virtual trackpad space on his iPad screen to manipulate it with. Here’s a short video to explain it:
Ben says this is most exciting for gamers. It won’t take much effort by game developers to add the TV-out functionality – and then anyone will be able to use their iPad (or, as Ben does in his demo video, an iPhone) as a wireless controller for whatever’s happening on their big TV screen.
You wanted apps on your TV? Boom. You got ’em.
