NVIDIA joins Miracast club

Is WiFi's 'AirPlay-killer' getting legs?

The Miracast certification being touted by the WiFi Alliance has a new adherent, with NVIDIA announcing that its Tegra 3 display proceesor will support the technology.

Miracast is a display mirroring technology pitched against Apple’s AirPlay and Intel’s WiDi, both of which are criticized as single-vendor closed environments. The idea is to bypass the main 2.4 GHz channel (the one you’re busy using to download Torrents or whatever) and create a peer-to-peer connection at 5 GHz from one display (on a mobile or a – gasp – desktop) to another (a suitably-equipped TV).

It’s login-free and since it’s just one MAC address talking to another, low-latency.

With NVIDIA joining the program (following Marvell and Texas Instruments last month), Miracast would become available to vendors like HTC who use its display processors – but only when devices using the quad-core Tegra 3 processors hit the shelves.

NVIDIA’s published a promotional and lightly-detailed white paper here. The WiFi Alliance promises that details of the Miracast spec will be published in August. ®