Couch potatoes will soon be waving, pointing, swiping and tapping to control their TVs.
Couch potatoes will soon be waving, pointing, swiping and tapping to control their TVs
The sets will recognise who is watching and will try to guess what viewers want to see. They will respond to more natural speech and will connect with smartphones in a single touch.
The idea is to make TV watching easier and more pleasant as viewers are confronted with more and more choices – from the hundreds of live TV channels from the cable or satellite provider to online video services such as Netflix Inc., Hulu and Apple’s iTunes.
A traditional remote control that lets viewers flip through channels one at a time suddenly seems inadequate.
Samsung President Boo-Keun Yoon said the company was developing “TVs that have the power to create the ultimate lean-back experience”. But don’t worry about Big Brother looking back at you.
Manufacturers will allow motion-capturing cameras to be pointed away.
Gesture recognition still has a long way to go, and in some demonstrations at this week’s International CES show, voice commands got lost in translation.
At a crowded Samsung booth, one attendant demonstrated how hand gestures were used to play simple children’s games.
Raising her hand brought up an on-screen cursor. Grasping the air was equivalent to clicking on what her digital hand was hovering over.
However, when she tried the same gestures on a menu of TV-watching options, the TV did not respond well.
When she tried to give a kind of sideways wave – like the Queen’s greeting – the page did not swipe to the left as it should have.
The technology appeared less responsive compared with the Xbox 360’s Kinect motion-control system, which seems to do a much better job at swiping through menus.
Later, in a quiet, enclosed Samsung booth, the TV struggled to comprehend voice commands. The TV was asked: “find me a movie with Tom Cruise,” and correctly pulled up an online trailer of his latest movie, Jack Reacher.
The system was then asked to “find me dramas”. The command “Number 3” was given to choose the third option in the results, but the TV instead started a new search and offered a range of viewing options for Sommersby.
There are some safeguards in place so that the TV would not misinterpret casual conversations or gestures as actual commands.
Viewers need to press a button before giving a voice command, and must stand still for a few seconds and raise one hand before an on-screen cursor appears for gesture commands.
Paul Gagnon, a TV analyst with research firm NPD Group, said the technologies are still in their early days.
“Most interaction I’ve had with gesture and voice control... it’s not real great right now,” he said.
“Right now, a lot of people in the industry are just trying to explore the possibilities.”