MMO zealots can rejoice, it’s possible to play video games from your desktop on your iPad—although you do have to stream them. And there’s even some suggestion of an app being developed for the iPhone to do the same thing (although that’s still in its nascent stages.) While not everyone plays World of Warcraft, it became the focus of attention when WoW Insider interviewed the developers of this interesting iPad app.

Let’s see what Joe Bertolami and Nicolas Lazareff of pandaelf has to say about the product,

OK, let’s back up a little bit. What exactly is everyAir?

It’s a remote desktop application that we designed from the ground up to be fast enough to handle games. We believe that touch interfaces can be a suitable replacement for mouse and keyboard in some (many?) gaming scenarios. We think that gaming on touch devices has more potential than many of the games out there today, which are just simple touches or shaking your phone back and forth. Admittedly, you’re never going to have 500 APM or tank 25-man Lich King heroic using an iPhone, but we’re trying to make complex games playable via touch interfaces.
For me, the main “scenario” (in software dev jargon) was being able to more easily play two characters at once. Having a small screen that you can touch to play a secondary character is really nice. For those readers into StarCraft 2, the other thing we’ve found that is really neat is having the minimap be full screen on your iPad, which makes it way easier to monitor the game.

While it’s obvious that not all games—or even MMOs—will be playable with this sort of interface, it does show a certain brand of ingenuity that will probably go over well with a lot of online gaming enthusiasts. That is: the ability to take their game with them remotely. The iPad (and eventually the iPhone) may become a connection to the gaming world the same way that they are now to the business and social world. Although, really intense game play will probably be stuck at the console and PC level, it does mean that they never need to be too far away.

This would be the reverse of the trend of producing games for handheld devices (social and casual games) and instead bridging the handheld and heavier devices.

As a product, everyAir provides a touch-control mechanism for playing video games like World of Warcraft and Star Craft II. Two pads control movement (as if it were a mouse for location and direction) and the rest is controlled by fingertip-click. This should be sufficient for most video games (and a great deal of other desktop applications) for simple control. In fact, their commercial video shows of both use for video gaming and desktop publishing software.

The company, pandaelf, looks like a small group of technology enthusiasts. everyAir, as a product, is their second app for iOS devices—right after Knuckleheads, a series of impressions by Frank Caliendo.

Remote control of desktops by remote devices has long been a desired aspect of many handheld devices and the video gaming experience shouldn’t be far behind. everyAir sells for $4.99 and runs on the iPad. The proof of concept really does seem to sell itself!

With a tagline like, “Enough with productivity, start having fun!” who can go wrong?