BEIJING— Lenovo Group Ltd. LNVGY 1.93% is investing in the development of a new videogame console, part of a broader push by the Chinese personal-computer company to branch out into new product categories including tablet-style PCs and smartphones.

Lenovo spokesman Jay Chen said Friday that the company has established a game console company called Beijing eedoo Technology Ltd., which will manage the development of an entertainment console called eBox. The console was first developed internally by Lenovo.

"We saw game consoles as an area with growth potential," he said. The company assembled a team to create a console prototype, then split it off as a separate company earlier this month.

Early prototypes of the eBox include technology that allows users to interact with the console through a camera, without a controller, Mr. Chen said, similar to Microsoft Corp.'s Kinect motion technology, unveiled for its Xbox console earlier this year.

Lenovo has long been heavily reliant on the popularity of its PCs in China and on the ThinkPad PC brand it purchased from International Business Machines Corp. in 2005. Now the Chinese company, the world's fourth largest PC maker by unit sales, is trying to launch innovative new products—but it has yet to prove it can do so successfully.

Lenovo has also been working on a tablet PC, joining rivals like Hewlett-Packard Co. , Dell Inc. and Acer Inc. that are seeking to take advantage of the consumer craze caused by Apple Inc.'s iPad. But the status of that effort isn't clear.

At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Lenovo unveiled a hybrid PC called the IdeaPad U1—a laptop with a screen that could be detached and used as a separate tablet PC. That was supposed to have been released in June, but the release has been delayed indefinitely.

Mr. Chen declined to comment specifically on the tablet effort, but said Lenovo is developing a "family of mobile Internet devices." The company has said its devices will be integrated so users can access their applications and other information from multiple platforms, possibly including a tablet PC. The operating systems for the devices has yet to be determined, but Mr. Chen said Lenovo is interested in open technologies such as, but not limited to, Android.

In April, Lenovo launched a touchscreen smartphone with a detachable Qwerty keyboard running Google's Android operating system. But sales of the LePhone have been limited because of a shortage in touchscreen panels. Lenovo Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing has said the company expects to resolve the panel shortage in the near future and aims to sell a million units within one year.

The game console business is far from a guarantee for Lenovo. Mr. Chen said eedoo plans to launch the eBox in China first, where regulations of game consoles are murky and rampant piracy poses a big challenge for console game sales, which are a major source of profit for game console makers like Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. For this reason, PC games that are free-to-play and make revenue from value-added services like sales of virtual items are most popular among Chinese video game players.

Eedoo's website says the eBox will be released in China by the end of 2010. It will be compatible with high-definition televisions, and that users will be able to download new content to the console through the Internet. Lenovo, as well as its parent Legend Holdings, which holds a 45% stake in Lenovo, and Legend Capital, the investment arm of Legend holdings, each hold a stake in eedoo, but Lenovo declined to give more details of the ownership structure.

—Owen Fletcher contributed to this article.

Write to Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com