Alienware Idea Nyx affords a holistic view of gaming at residence

This story is part of CES, where CNET covers the latest news on the most incredible tech coming soon.

Prematurely of CES, Dell supplied us a peek at its imaginative and prescient of what your own home gaming expertise might appear like within the close to future. The Alienware Idea Nyx inhabits a world the place you may pause Fortnite or Guardians of the Galaxy in the lounge and proceed enjoying in your bed room. The place you may launch your video games from throughout storefronts like Steam or Epic and providers like GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Gaming, all aggregated inside a single app that operates the identical approach in your TVs, phones, PCs and different gadgets. The place you may ship a sport session to your child to get assist with that closing boss battle. And extra.

Sure, lots of these are technologically doable proper now, however Alienware hopes Nyx will tie all of it along with much more polish and rather less latency.

The prototype implementation we noticed primarily combines a sport server, which is kind of a sport PC on steroids, a sensible controller and software program that ties them collectively. Notably absent is a console just like the Xbox Series X or S, PS5 or Nintendo Switch, as a result of that approach lies a technologically difficult can of worms. Nor does Alienware need to displace an influence gaming desktop or laptop computer, although video games put in on the server may connect with a giant display screen straight.

The field itself would park close to your modem or router, straight related to it through Ethernet and broadcasting video games which are both put in on it or streaming from the cloud to your gadgets over Wi-Fi. It is meant to let members of a family play completely different video games concurrently (in addition to multiplayer video games collectively) with out slowing your Wi-Fi or enter lag to a crawl.

The prototype we noticed was a monolithic, sharp-edged black tower that regarded extra prefer it got here from Razer’s design group than Alienware’s. But when this server makes it previous the drafting board you may wager it can appear like one of many extra natural Legend designs typical of all of the Alienware gear.

The controller is essential — virtually actually. In Alienware’s ideation, it carries your logins, your sport library, when and the place you final left off and, in an ideal world, have proximity detection to select up play seamlessly as you progress from room to room.

Though finally the aim is to work with third-party controllers, initially it is probably to make use of Alienware’s personal. What’s that you simply say? Alienware does not have its personal controller? Effectively, it has been enjoying round with dramatic designs for one for some time, and we bought to revisit the one which was a part of the corporate’s fantasy gaming handheld from final 12 months’s CES, Alienware Concept UFO. 

That by no means materialized, although. Perhaps it will, in some kind or one other.