User interfaces – Beyond the hype

When you think about our everyday interactions, we use our hands for gestures and pointing, our voice for speech, and our eyes and face for expression, and we use them simultaneously. There’s no reason the way we interact with devices like our TV won’t be the same in the future, however it isn’t easy to do. Our expressions, gestures and language are subject to cultural differences. One gesture in Spain could mean something entirely different in France so it’s debatable whether a gesture-only interaction language for universal use could even be developed.

At this year’s CES we saw a plethora of different technologies reinventing the way we interact with the TV, including device less gesture control and voice control. The demonstrations of device less functionality were impressive and, as we have seen with the Kinect, there is a market for active content interaction, particularly in gaming. With voice we had companies such as Ford, Lenovo, LG, Nuance and Samsung touting voice control for high-definition television, UltraThin laptops and even cars. Apple’s Siri solution has showed that there is potential for voice-control and that could certainly extend to the TV market.

While each of these technologies offer innovative and interesting ways of enhancing the TV viewing experience, we believe that the experience needs to remain (for the most-part) passive and inactive in order to drive mass market adoption. At the same time, control devices need to be able to keep up with the more active experiences Smart TVs can offer such as playing games. Today’s remote control device certainly doesn’t do this type of interaction justice.

In a perfect world all these technologies (gesture, voice and device) would come together and provide both a relaxed experience for ‘slobbing out’ in front of the TV, as well as one that lets users actively interact with apps and games. We would argue that not all of them provide a completely natural interaction experience yet. Device less gesture technologies still take the viewer too far into active participation to be suitable for all viewing scenarios, universal gesture-based device interaction is still some way off and voice control hasn’t overcome all its challenges either. Multiple Service Operators and TV operators should thoroughly test their interaction technologies with consumers to understand their likes and dislikes regarding the TV experience. Philips has done this and observed their behaviour with a diverse mix of in-house psychologists, anthropologists and physical therapists.

The payoff is we’ve been able to develop a user interaction model that allows consumers to get the most out of new features of Smart TVs and also allows a relaxing TV experience.

CES 2012: The Smart TV Digest – third installment

The third edition of our Smart TV Digest features the latest announcements, products and analysis from CES. Don’t forget to check out our full coverage from Las Vegas

CES 2012: The Smart TV Digest – third installment

Vizio and Google Announces VAP430 Media Stream Player [Winarco]

Vivante GPU Powers Leading Smart TV Platforms [The Sacramento Bee]

Gameloft Unveils a Rich Catalog of Games for Lenovo K91 Smart TV at CES 2012 [PR Newswire]

OnLive reveals Google TV cloud-gaming app incoming [SlashGear]

Smart TVs Abound at CES, but Ecosystems Are Destined for War [Wired]

CES: Samsung Plugs Into Pay TV Services [Multichannel]

Screaming Velocity Demonstrates TV Recommendation Technology at CES 2012 [The Sacramento Bee]

Challenges Ahead Before 2012 Is The Year Of Connected TV [paidContent]

CES: Day 2 – sense and simplicity

The second day of CES kicked off with similar electricity and buzz surrounding Smart TVs and ways of controlling them. With attention focussed on applying different and new technologies to solve the TV interaction challenge, it is perhaps a more conservative approach that is thought of as a true step forward.

One of the reasons the TV remote has been so popular, and remained almost unchanged for decades, is its simplicity. You could navigate in a linear fashion from one channel to another, or adjust volume, without the need to get up from your seat. The layout was pretty standard across each device, with channel buttons displayed in rows of threes in numerical order. Symbols were standardised for certain functions such as the “input” or “teletext”, and even though more buttons may have appeared over the years, the basic design and principle has remained the same. The result is you can pick-up any remote control and know how to use it within seconds.

The challenge is TV is no longer linear. Smart TVs don’t just provide more content; these devices are enabling new forms of interaction, and these interactions require control beyond that of pushing a button. The problem is that the many of the various technologies on show at CES, such as voice interaction and Kinect style deviceless gesture control are impressive but not necessarily what consumers want to use every day to change the channel.

I do believe these technologies have their place and do wonders for getting the industry mobilised in changing and evolving ideas, but consumers still need familiarity when it comes to TV interaction. Whether gaming or watching a show, they need to know that the button is still available to press if needs be. We believe in an evolution not a revolution of TV interaction.

CES: Day 1 – 2012 the year TV control enters the spotlight

The annual Consumer Electronics Show has always been the place to launch new products that have the potential to change the living room TV experience. From the first plasma high definition TVs launched in 2001, to the introduction of OLED screens offering the thinnest, lightest and most vibrant displays ever seen in 2009.  From what I’ve seen so far, CES 2012 is set to mark another milestone in how the viewing experience will change.

Day 1 kicked off with many of the biggest CE manufacturers touting their latest and greatest Smart TVs. These connected televisions offer viewers the widest range of content, from OTT and Video On Demand, to gaming on demand and hundreds of apps. But Smart TVs are nothing new; in fact the first devices were announced three years ago. So, what’s the real buzz about this year?

The answer is control: CES 2012 is turning out to be the year of the control device. Until now the remote control and user interface have been forgotten about while TV screen technologies and hardware functionality significantly improve.

Now the industry seems to have woken up to the fact that it has to replace the traditional remote control. With a plethora of services offered via the TV, many of them interactive, the risk of not providing an intuitive and interactive control experience could result in the entire Smart TV market failing.

The potential solutions in the mix range from voice control, pointing, mobile applications and deviceless gestures. While voice interaction is getting a lot of attention, many industry commentators see it as no more than a gimmick, yet feel that pointing solutions (which evolve the current remote control) are a more realistic option – especially while consumers still want to be largely passive when watching TV. Although it remains to be seen which of these technologies will win in the long run, what is certain is that the way we physically interact with TV will change for the better.

CES 2012: The Smart TV Digest – the second installment

It’s here! Our second installment of the Smart TV Digest bringing you the latest announcements and products from CES 2012.

CES 2012: The Smart TV Digest

LG Cinema Screen 3D TV packs 1mm bezel and dual-view for gaming [SlashGear]

CES 2012: Focus on the User Experience [Streaming Media]

Lenovo unveils smart TV running Android 4.0 [Telecoms Paper]

Samsung InTouch Transforms Your Decrepit HDTV into a Smart TV [Chip Chick]

Always Innovating’s HDMI dongle turns any HDTV into a “Smart” TV [Gizmag]

Canonical unveils Ubuntu TV at CES [The H]

Samsung Launches New Smart TV Ad Platform, Samsung AdHub [TechCrunch]

Cloud gaming service Gaikai strikes major Smart TV integration deal [Gamasutra]

Qualcomm targets TVs, PCs in bid to expand beyond phones [FierceWireless]

MySpace social TV with Panasonic [Advanced Television]

Samsung Announces Set-Top “Boxless” Viewing in All 2012 Smart TVs [Sun Herald]

Toshiba Announces Its Most Advanced 3D Smart TV Series For 2012 [EON]

Broadcom, Hisense team up to launch Wi-Fi Smart TV [Telecom Paper]

The evolving living room TV experience

With the pace of change in living room technologies now moving so quickly it’s hard to imagine what the next 5 years will bring to the television. What is certain is that content will remain key and we’ll see significant growth in on-demand service delivery. Although content is likely to remain king, the TV viewing experience is about more than that alone. We’re seeing new platforms, applications and services for TVs launched virtually every month (particularly around this time of year as we gear up for CES) but if the content is difficult to find or use for the consumer, the effort spent on service enhancements will be lost. We spoke to industry expert Chris Painter this week who agreed, he said: “Having to sift through multiple apps to get to one provider’s content is not a great experience. The industry today is replacing channels with apps and people already complain about having too many channels”.

With this in mind, a complete revision of the traditional TV user interface  and EPG needs to happen. The conventions of the existing user interface, such as the traditional control device, is the biggest current hindrance to the improvements in experience that users should get from having new services and content on the TV. Indeed Painter argues that the lifecycle of the TV is too long to take full advantage of the ‘smarter’ applications that are gradually being added to it. In fact, in the US most value-add services still come via peripheral devices like the STB and OTT so in order for the TV to retain its position at the heart of the living room, the way in which we discover and navigate content on it, whether traditional live broadcast, on-demand programming, games or apps, will need to change.

At Philips we believe that different control functionalities will need to exist simultaneously to retain the innately ‘relaxing’ experience associated with TVs. Painter agrees that voice input may filter into our interactions with the TV, telling us: “Roughly 50% of the time people know what they are looking for when they sit in front of the TV, and with simple voice command, they could have it in front of them in seconds”, but we would argue that voice command technologies are not without their difficulties, however. Those consumers that have experienced Siri and comparable technologies understand where some of the technology’s limitations lie and whether such a concept would work in the ‘lean-back’ setting of the living room remains to be seen because they don’t allow for viewer inactivity. Painter suggested that while none of the voice demand services currently on the market are perfect “they will only continue to get better”, but we would argue that voice control is not a solution for casual gaming on the TV either, instead pointing is best placed for enjoying simple point and click games and navigating the EPG.

To understand how the TV viewing experience, and how we interact with the TV, may develop in the future however, the gaming industry does provide a useful point of reference. Painter said that “new ways to interact with the TV and the content coming through it have evolved from the games industry and will continue to evolve”. He believes that devices including the Wii and Microsoft Kinect have brought gesture control technology into the mainstream market and many living rooms, meaning consumers are becoming physically connected to their game consoles because their movements are acted out on screen.  We agree with Painter when he says he doesn’t see full gesture control, like Kinect, becoming mainstream for all devices, and that includes the TV because users will not want to ‘actively’ interact with their TVs every time.

So it is clear that familiarity with directly interacting with devices is growing among consumers. Touchscreen mobile phones and tablet devices, as well as gesture controlled games consoles, are mainstream products today, however it remains to be seen which form of direct interaction wins out when it comes to experiencing content on our TVs. Technology already exist that provides a similar touchscreen experience to TVs without having to get up to physically touch the screen. This includes the ability to switch channels, adjust volume or manipulate photos on the screen with just the flick of a wrist.

While I’m sure the future could see anything from TVs that pause the second you leave the room, or switch on once you’re sitting comfortably on the sofa, before then it’s the traditional user interface and the remote control that need modernising to allow them to cope with the new ‘smart’ services on TVs.

N.B. Chris Painter is senior product manager at Comcast. All views in this article are his own and do not reflect that of Comcast.

CES 2012 – The Smart TV Digest

In the build up to CES 2012 we’re bringing you a digest of all the Smart TV  announcements, from new TV sets to content and apps, through to the technology that matters. Think we’ve missed something? Let us know in the comments.

CES 2012 – The Smart TV Digest

MediaTek releases high-end smart TV chip [Rapid TV News]

Roku Evolve Internet TV From Set-Top Box To Stick [WorldTVPC]

Samsung Smart TV ads gobble credit cards: Spend money with your remote [ElectricPig]

TransGaming expands ‘smart TV’ platform with $7M acquisition [Gamasutra]

Broadcom announces smart TV chips [VR-Zone]

Cloud TV Box is announced by Sungale [MMD Newswires]

Microsoft to pair DVR with next Xbox? [CNET]

Logitech Cube looks to reimagine the mouse, converts to a presenter should the need arise [Engadget]

Sony releases television that shows each person on the sofa a totally different screen [The Daily Mail]

ACCESS MyTV OTT Multiscreen Video Platform Launches at CES Allowing Consumers to Create, Watch and Share Personal Video Channels on any Connected Device [Access]

Marvell’s new chip fills Google TV void left by Intel [ComputerWorld]

PlayJam partners with GameHouse for its Smart TV gaming platform [PocketGamer]

Google and Apple to go head to head over ‘smart’ TVs [The Guardian]