Rolomotion Brings Wii-Style Tennis To The Apple TV With New iPhone App

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Back in April, we told you about Rolomotion, a new gaming platform for iOS that leverages the iPhone’s hardware sensors to create a Wii-like gaming experience on the Apple TV. Developed by Rolocule Games, the first Rolomotion game is available in the App Store, and it’s called Motion Tennis.

As the name implies, it’s a tennis game that requires an iPhone and Apple TV. Unlike most iOS games, the iPhone acts as a motion-aware controller. While it’s certainly not as polished as playing Wii Sports, Rolomotion is forecasting the future of Apple TV gaming.

Once you download the Motion Tennis app, connect your iPhone to your Apple TV via AirPlay and enable screen mirroring. Then open Motion Tennis on the iPhone and it will take over the Apple TV.

The game’s graphics leave much to be desired, but this is more of a proof of concept than anything else at this point. The technology is there, and more importantly, it works. Using the iPhone as a tennis racquet feels responsive, and there are multiple hand motions for hitting the ball different ways. More than one iPhone can connect to the same Apple TV and play multiplayer mode. I noticed very little lag during gameplay over AirPlay on my home WiFi network.

There’s a lot of potential for Rolomotion to help usher in a new wave of iOS games. More titles are in the works, and eventually a SDK will be given to third-party developers. Rolomotion is unique in that it doesn’t require any additional hardware, and Rolocule had to work with Apple to make it happen.

Apple is also giving developers the ability to create hardware controllers for iOS 7, which opens up even more opportunity.

Motion Tennis is available in the App Store for $8. It requires the iPhone 5, 4S or 5th gen iPod Touch.

Source: App Store

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