For the past several years, Dell (and its gaming brand, Alienware) has loved showcasing concept devices – as a potential glimpse of what may be in the future. In fact, it is a growing trend in the consumer electronics industry as a whole that is taking a page out of the book of the automotive world. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a fascinating glimpse into a potential future or a little diversion.
It’s an opportunity for Dell to gauge community interest in technology that isn’t quite ready for prime time. The most famous recent example is Concept UFO, a handheld game console that Alienware showed around this time last year and which is still very much a concept to this day.
Credit: Alienware
Concept Nyx comes to the product this year and essentially works as a home server that can stream games throughout the house. The ultimate idea behind the product enables homes to stream multiple games to multiple devices at the same time, regardless of the hardware they’re playing on. The controller meanwhile serves as the primary contact that connects to a smart TV, computer, or other device and plays the game through a Dell app.
There are likely to be a few issues to be solved, including pricing and the type of processing power required to stream multiple games at the same time. Adding a bunch of CPUs and GPUs to a product adds up pretty quickly, although none of it sounds too far out of the ordinary when streaming over home WiFi.
I think the bigger question is how much is the demand for something? I suspect that a large part of the potential audience has already invested in gaming PCs or consoles. And even if it weren’t, such a product would have to be competitively priced – certainly the promise of streaming two (or even four) games at the same time in one house isn’t worth a product that costs as much to most as two consoles Scenarios.
Credit: Alienware
The company writes in a blog post,
We looked at how you can run four game streams at the same time, switch between devices intelligently, and get all your games from a central library, regardless of where you buy them. Playing on Concept Nyx aims to be as effortless as accessing your favorite music, TV shows and movies. Imagine a simple app that loads on any device and provides instant access to all of your games for a more seamless gaming experience across all devices in the home. Imagine that while playing the game, you no longer argue with your family or roommates (you can still argue over groceries and laundry). Wouldn’t it be nice to pull down the barricades so everyone can play on their own terms?
Again, this is firmly in the concept phase, but in its current iteration, Nyx will likely sound like before it hits the market.
