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

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]

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.

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

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]

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

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]

At Philips Media Interaction we’ve been researching human/device interaction for years and have concluded that pointing should play a part in any interaction with devices because it is the most intuitive human action. Our research shows that pointing is one of the first things small children do and is the only interaction gesture that is not taught. In view of this, Philips developed a new intuitive user interaction model that allows consumers to point directly at objects on screen in a similar fashion to touch screens.

The result was the uWand technology, a natural pointing solution that uses direct pointing technologies and advanced Philips algorithms to eliminate users’ hand tremor and to compensate for the angle from and the distance to the TV. The result is a constant sense of control and an intuitive way of navigating the interactive services offered through smart TVs.

The control tasks that uWand enables are wide ranging and include:

• gaming with gestures and motion
• point and click on objects
• easily reach the edges of the screen
• select pages on screen
• rotate and zoom on images (z-axis)
• pick up moving objects
• z-axis manipulation for 3D UIs
• drag and drop images on screen

Working with FLO interactive, a specialist user interface design company, Philips developed a whitepaper to highlight the basic principles of graphical user interface design with cursor navigation in terms of: dragging, flicking, zooming, rotating and pointing and clicking gestures.

What’s clear from our focus groups research is each of these actions makes sense to users. The trick is to combine these actions without interference and degradation.

To find out more about how Philips has addressed this you can download the whitepaper in full from uWand.com.   

Without giving too much away, I will be examining the basic communication protocols that need to be adopted for human to machine interaction to ensure they are universally understood, as well as asking whether a universal language for multi-device interaction could, or should, be developed: One that could mean the same gesture can be applied to all devices in the living room, including devices beyond the TV.

At Philips we look as much to anthropology and psychology as we do to pure technology research to tackle these challenges. uWand ‘remote touch’ technology is a result of this and addresses the immediate need for much more sophisticated control of next generation TVs, as well as other sectors of the market.

With uWand we are able to maintain the core, recreational, ‘lean back’ experience of traditional broadcast television, and open the door to significant revenue generating opportunities for device manufacturers, service providers, application developers and content owners.

Follow us on Twitter (@uWandcontrol) to find out more.

In my opinion, the addition (and apparent success) of the Connected World hall really drove home that multi-screen TV / TV Everywhere was this year’s main theme again. In previous years however, the focus has been on how to share content between devices, whereas this year I was aware of much more interest in the interaction between user and content.

Opposite our stand, NDS demoed its ‘Surfaces’ concept which in essence was a wall-sized video screen showing the different types of interactive content you might have on each of your devices, in one place. Interestingly, they did not use a traditional remote to control the content, which implies the industry is becoming more aware that they need to find a replacement for it: Today’s remote controls simply aren’t capable of the navigation required for anything more than up/down, left/right controls. The fact our stand was busier than ever before is also testament to that fact!

NDS chose to use a companion tablet device to control the content on their ‘wall’. While applications were definitely still hot this year, I personally think there is too much focus on using apps on mobile devices as a controller. I agree that apps can help address roll-out scenarios and for certain use cases, such as search, they do make sense, but I’m not sure that the usability is suited to all demographics. The fact that smart phones need to be logged in or activated before use means additional steps are needed before controlling the TV and that could put users off.

Gaming on Smart TVs is gaining in popularity and with the over 55s making up the largest demographic for games on SmartTVs (according to a gaming partner of ours), we need to make usage simple: controlling linear TV, navigating OTT content, and playing games in a simple to use controller. Similarly we need to try and prevent gaming revenues leaking to the smart phone stores.

Speaking of demos, however, we had many more demonstrations with our partners’ products this year, both on our own stand and on theirs, which really helped bring the potential of uWand to life. We understand that without seeing it in action it’s hard to think of the technology as a fully-fledged solution, ready to be implemented in CE devices, but this year we received a lot of positive feedback about the technology being obviously market-ready.

You can find more of our thoughts and views from IBC on Twitter (@uWandControl)