Transform Your iPad Into a Portable Screen with Orion: The Ultimate External Display Solution

The screens on our mobile devices are getting better and better every day. For some of you, the screens on your phones, tablets, or laptops might be even better than the screens on your TVs and monitors, for what it’s worth. So, wouldn’t it be really cool if you could take the screen on your iPad and use it as a display output? Well, that’s exactly what an app called Orion is proposing.

Orion does exactly what it says it does — it lets you take your console, PC, or any display output, and hook it up to your iPad using an external HDMI to USB-C adapter. Then, Orion will take that HDMI signal and display it on the iPad, allowing you to use your iPad as an external, portable display. The possibilities are endless. You can play games on it, use it as a monitor for your computer, plug in a Raspberry Pi for some on-the-go Linux development, connect a camera (many of them have HDMI outputs) to have a larger viewfinder, or anything else.

Lux

The Orion app uses the new external USB webcam support in iPadOS 17 , which also happens to work with HDMI capture devices that present themselves as USB video sources. Another challenge with using an iPad as an external display is its non-standard resolution, which can make an incoming 1080p video feed look fuzzy. To solve this, Orion employs AI upscaling to take the lower-resolution video and try to adapt it to the iPad’s display. It still won’t look perfect, but it will be an improvement in most cases.

This makes the iPad much more useful as an external monitor, especially since the existing options only worked when connected to a Mac or PC. You can download Orion for free from the App Store , but your iPad will have to be updated to iPadOS 17 before it will work. It doesn’t appear to be supported on iPhones — even the new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro series with the same USB Type-C ports as modern iPads. You also need a compatible USB adapter, and the model recommended by the developers is $20.

Source: Lux

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