Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook: ASRock AIWI turns your iPhone / iPod touch into HTPC motion controller (video)

Thursday, June 03, 2010

ASRock AIWI turns your iPhone / iPod touch into HTPC motion controller (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/03/asrock-aiwi-turns-your-iphone-ipod-touch-into-htpc-motion-cont/

You may not think to look at ASRock when considering a new pre-fabricated HTPC, but the company had two new SFF boxes at Computex that could certainly suffice. The Vision 3D (available in black / silver and with or without a Blu-ray drive) was the sleeker of the two, with a minuscule form factor that could easily be tucked beneath your cable box and a Core i5-520M CPU at the helm. Other specs include NVIDIA GeForce 300 / 400 series graphics, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 2.5-inch 500GB hard drive, slot-loading optical drive, 7.1-channel audio (with a fancy THX certification logo, to boot), gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and a bundled remote. The other guy (Core 100 / 200 series) looks an awful lot like the S330 that we spotted at CeBIT last year, offering a Core i3-330M CPU, integrated Intel graphics, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a Blu-ray combo drive and the same general port arrangement as the Vision 3D. Both units will ship with Windows 7 Home Premium, though no pricing or release date information was available.

In related news, the company was also showing off its newly released AIWI solution, which consists of an iPod touch / iPhone app and a lightweight application that runs on ASRock motherboards in order to allow for motion control gaming with an iDevice you already own. The demo that we saw here in Taiwan was perfectly seamless, and the responsiveness was on par with Nintendo's Wiimote. Apparently this is designed to be used exclusively with ASRock mobos (whereas similar alternatives from Sixense can work with any setup), but it's still a solid addition for those who tend to end up with ASRock-labeled gear. Enough yappin' -- head on past the break to catch the action yourself.

Gallery: ASRock HTPCs and AIWI motion control system at Computex 2010