I have to admit, the CRISTAL remote is pretty amazing. A multinational joint development effort between  Michael Haller’s team at the Media Interaction Lab of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and researchers at the University of Waterloo, the University of Tokyo, and Keio University, this futuristic remote control concept won the Emerging Technology Award at SIGGRAPH this week. Small wonder — using the CRISTAL interface is as easy as falling out of bed.

Conceptually, CRISTAL takes the Microsoft Surface touch interface and integrates it with other devices in your home. It’s cool to think of being able to dim the lights by dragging your finger over them, or to move media around the room between digital picture frames and the television via drag-and-drop. Yes, this is the remote interface I dream about.

The problem is, we aren’t likely to see it commercially available anytime soon. Or even anytime after that. I won’t say never, but this kind of thing has basically no chance for commercialization. In a Wired article today, Priya Ganapati digs into interviews with some of the project team members. In an apparent moment of candor, Professor Stacey Scott admits that the technology is expensive right now. Ganapati concludes it might be five to ten years before prices come down and these things start appearing in our homes.

Actually, price is the easy nut to crack. With technology, it’s almost a given that prices will come down, so if we hang our hat on cost as the reason why this doesn’t exist today, it seems inevitable that it will come sooner or later. The reality is much less sure.

Consider this: 99% of all remote controls today use infrared technology circa 1970. This despite the fact that it is one-way and low bandwidth. Radio frequency technology (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UHF, ZigBee, Z-Wave) solves these problems and is hardly cutting edge or expensive anymore, but it doesn’t begin to approach critical mass.

What’s the hold-up?

1. Standards. There are literally thousands of electronic device manufacturers out there, and corralling them all together is like herding cats. Worse. Remember VHS vs Betamax? HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray? These were cake walks compared to the effort it will take to standardize a bi-directional communication protocol so that your lights can talk to your coffee table.
2. All that stuff you already own. How long has it taken us to roll out HDTV? How many millions did Congress have to appropriate for converter boxes? (Answer: $1.5 billion) Are you really going to throw away (tens of) thousands of dollars of light fixtures, televisions, vacuum cleaners, stereo equipment, DVD players, thermostats, and other electronics just so that you can use this coffee table controller? The cost of the product itself pales in comparison to the actual expense.

The issue here is that there are lots of things that are technologically feasible, but only the tiniest slice of them is commercially viable. Of course academics don’t care — their job is to dream big. But we in the public shouldn’t get our hopes up. Chances are, this will never happen — at least not as pictured here.

The fact is, researchers and even commercial product development engineers have been imagining all kinds of home automation scenarios for decades, but it is hard to find a home with the right wiring and connectivity to make it all work.

One development that seems promising: the increasing ubiquity of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has caught hold because 1) it’s wireless, and 2) it is relatively easy to justify the cost of setting up and maintaining a Wi-Fi network to bring Internet to computers throughout the home. Although Wi-Fi wasn’t really designed with home automation in mind (in particular, it is a very power-hungry protocol), we are already seeing it integrated into a number of other devices. Wi-Fi doesn’t solve the problem of getting all those devices to talk to one another, but at least they are all on the same network.