One of the most common questions heard in the modern home
is "Where’s the remote?" Thanks to the Hitachi Gesture Remote TV that
question might just disappear.
The Gesture Remote TV prototype on demo was the coolest
thing we saw at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and it offered very polished performance.
The system works thanks to gesture-recognition software developed by Gesturetek and a
special-purpose camera made by Canesta. The software is sophisticated enough to ignore
common gestures (raising your hands in triumph when your team scores, for example), but is
it also very simple to operate.
To turn on the TV, you wave at it as if to say
"Hello." Once powered up, the system is primed to look for several preset
gestures it can recognize. If you want to change the channel, move your hand, palm out,
left and right. The display then changes to show a series of cascaded windows each with a
still preview of what’s on that particular channel. To cycle through them, simply
rotate your hand palm out until the desired channel is reached. Turning off the TV is as
simple as bringing both hands together, fingers pointing toward the TV, and then
"pushing" one hand toward the TV.
Such sophisticated technology deserves more applications
than simply changing the channel and adjusting the volume. Hitachi is therefore looking at
adding the capability to have the TV control networked devices, such as home lighting,
heating and cooling. It’s not hard to imagine all kinds of uses for gesture
technology, from controlling video games to surfing the Internet, dialing the telephone or
even creating some free-air sketches.
Hitachi says that the gesture-control technology is still
in the prototype stage, but spectators had no trouble mastering it -- and the TV had no
trouble interpreting their movements -- with just a few seconds of use. The next big task
for the company is to integrate the gesture camera into a TV chassis (the prototype was
mounted on the wall). If all goes well, look for Hitachi Gesture Remote Control TVs to
appear later this year or in 2010.
