OnLive Multiview on an LG Google TV, eyes-on (video)
Between the giant screen gaming demos, the shiny new hardware and the ever-present booth babes, the Electronic Entertainment Expo may well be the short attention span capital of North America at the moment. How does one possible manage to up the ante on electronic attention deficit disorder? Nintendo and Microsoft have both made pretty admirable strives in that direction with the Wii U GamePad and SmartGlass, respectively, bringing a second screen to home game play. OnLive is helping move things along as well, by way of the MultiView feature, which brings several screens worth of content to a single display -- in other words, you have other games taking up screen real estate while you're playing a game.
OnLive's Spectate feature is nothing new, of course, letting you keep tabs on friends and scores of other players. MultiView, however, lets you watch that content while playing, the majority of the screen devoted to your own game, with this added footage in a sidebar. You can access the feature with the click of a button and chat with friends or coordinate with teammates. OnLive showed us the feature on an LG G2 Google TV -- the perfect opportunity for the company to highlight the new partnership. The 55-inch display also served as an ideal demo -- while the feature will also be available for mobile devices, you're really going to want a big screen, lest the whole thing become a little too cacophonous.
Surprisingly, the demo we got, which featured Just Cause 2 on the main screen, wasn't too distracting -- perhaps we've just become more accustomed to information overload than we care to admit. Again, most of the real estate is devoted to your own game, with a black bar underneath reminding you which button to press when you want out. You can also toggle to highlight different tiles on the screen. In the demo version, we were getting videos of the "top cheered" and "top spectated" games while we played.
It's certainly a logical next step for OnLive and one that better harnesses the sort of cloud-based community the company is looking to create with the service
