Gestural interface for TV
The rush towards gesture-based interface seems to be a new trend, as shown by this gesture-control for regular TV designed by Australian engineers Dr Prashan Premaratne and Quang Nguye.
What seems to change here is the fact that the concurrency problem is taken into account: “Crucially for anyone with small children, pets or gesticulating family members, the software can distinguish between real commands and unintentional gestures“. The good integration to a wide range of devices is also new (” elevision, video recorder, DVD player, hi-fi and digital set-top box”), acting as a universal remote control. In addition, the very basic gestural grammar designed here seems to be simple enough.
Why do I blog this? What is intriguing is the way it is referred to as “Wii-style”. This type of system has received a lot of interested in the last 20 years, lots of patents have been filed in the area. Maybe the Minority-Report-like UI as well as the frenziness towards multi-touch interface has led to a situation where people are expecting this sort of things to happen soon (normative future shape by cultural artifacts). The arrival of the Wii that can be seen as the “Steve Jobs of gestural interface” is also an important milestone. Will this pervade multimedia system controllers? Time will tell and it would be good to understand what works and what’s not working with the Wii in terms of users acceptances.
July 16th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
For me these “experimental” user-interfaces are somehow problematic as they replicate the behavioral patterns of users and often try to provide “efficiency” into old obvious or discovered usage patterns. Simply looking at the picture and seeing that the person is still sitting on the couch in front of the TV also doesn’t feel too uplifting..
July 16th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
If you’ve spent any time studying remotes and people you’ll know that there are often multiple people watching TV at once. The remote helps to disambiguate viewers from each other and grant agency to the remote-holder. Once that is gone, you’ll see mayhem in the living room.
And people are going to freak over a camera watching them in their living room, especially if it is connected to their cable box. People already consider telcos and cable/sat big brother.
Also, DVRs are incredibly complex. I doubt this system will scale to handle all those complex features.
July 16th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Hehe I’ve actually never said in the blogpost that I was utterly convinced by the system. I only found interesting the small steps that has been done. I agree with both comments and the drawbacks they highlight (as they describe the failures and possible limits).
July 17th, 2007 at 7:01 am
I observed my remote use once and noticed that probably 80-90% of the button pushes had to do with adjusting the audio level to suit the social situation at hand - in-room conversation, phone calls coming in - and not so much channel surfing.
July 17th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Is it just me, or does this look just like illustrated instructions for playing Rock, Paper, Scissors?!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743267516/authenticbore-20
Not too surprisingly, I’m very interested in gestural input for TV (and other things). But somehow, this doesn’t do it for me. Then again, I may be prejudiced by the Rock, Paper, Scissors connection!
Sarah
July 17th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Impressive, I haven’ thought about it but it’s definitely close!