Tired of your kids kicking your remote under the couch or stuffing it into the laundry basket? Kurt R has an answer. What’s that, you say? Your welding skills are a little rusty? Well, if you don’t have a spare anvil lying around, all is not lost. We at ThinkFlood have been working on a system to turn your iPhone into a universal remote control, so you’ll never have to go looking for that remote again. Let us know what you think.

This morning Curtis Silver posted an interesting article in Wired’s GeekDad blog in which he asks the question, “Who controls the remote in your house?” Curtis makes some interesting arguments for restricting control to certain people, for example:

My children and many like them are forbidden from touching the many remotes that control the many devices centered in and around the entertainment system. God forbid they screw up a setting on the Dolby Surround or switch to a different equalizer level. Even worse, set the DVR to record SpongeBob until the end of time. Every showing. All the time. Can you imagine a DVR full of SpongeBob?

Point taken. But limiting access to the remote has it’s own problems, which Curtis acknowledges:

Fights happen over the remote between men and women more between parents and children. Is this due to the feeling of power over the main attention getting appliance in the house or is this because it’s Monday night during football season and she wants to watch a DVR episode of “Dancing With the Stars?”

Interestingly, Curtis then jumps in to mention the evolution of remote controls into universal remotes, which he then eschews completely because it causes problems on both sides of his argument — it gives his kids control he doesn’t want to allow, and it prevents him from having a few remotes for himself and leaving a few for his wife.

I propose an alternative, and it’s something we’ve been working on for a little over a year. We call it the personal remote control. We’re still beta testing and hammering out a few issues, but the basic idea is this: each person should have her own remote, and that remote should control everything (well, maybe with some restrictions for the kids).

There are a couple of enabling technologies for the personal remote. One is home networking — Wi-Fi is practically ubiquitous these days, making it possible to connect a whole host of disparate devices. The other is the smartphone. For us right now, this means the iPhone (and iPod touch, though it’s not strictly a phone), but there is no reason we can’t extend this model to other Wi-Fi enabled cell phones.

Here’s how it works: we have a device that communicates with your home theater equipment (via infrared, perhaps with some future accommodation for Bluetooth or other protocols), and your smartphone communicates with that device over Wi-Fi. Each person in your house can have her own controller (maybe you have a common one that the kids share), which means each person can have their own sets of favorite channels and so forth. In fact, the iPhone touchscreen means button layouts and other preferences are completely configurable.

Don’t like touchscreen remotes? Curtis speculates about some future world in which we control the TV with a flip of the hand to a motion sensor. In fact, the version of our iPhone app that we are preparing for iTunes submission in the next couple of days already has motion sensitive gestures built-in. We’re going to have to wait a little while before thought control is a possibility.

Now in truth I have to admit that we haven’t yet implemented child-proof controls or full individual customization into our product. But Curtis’s suggestions here make a lot of sense, and maybe that’s one of the things we should work on next. Of course one of the good things about the RedEye personal remote control is that we can deliver free software updates to your iPhone just about whenever. What other remotes can do that?

According to a Crestron press release, their Mobile Pro app has been available for the iPhone since September 22. It’s about time — Crestron has been promising this app since the 2008 CEDIA Expo just over a year ago. As of today, it doesn’t seem that anyone has downloaded or reviewed the app on iTunes — maybe their customers gave up waiting.

Or maybe they were annoyed that after spending thousands of dollars on a Crestron system, they resented having to spend another $100 for a piece of software that costs the company nothing to distribute.

Doubtless, Crestron will sell its fair share of licenses to the Mobile Pro. After all, it does integrate with the entire system, and the ability to access Crestron functionality remotely (over the 3G or Edge networks) is pretty nifty. But if I had already spent top dollar on such a system for my home, I would feel a little underwhelmed. At least they could have offered an interface that fits more naturally with the iPhone. Any Crestron users out there disagree? Anyone? Buelller?

Ben Stein, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", ©1986 Paramount Pictures

]]> http://morecontrol.com/2009/09/crestron-mobile-pro-for-iphone/feed/ 0 http://morecontrol.com/2009/09/global-caches-itach-networked-remote-control-is-a-great-idea/ http://morecontrol.com/2009/09/global-caches-itach-networked-remote-control-is-a-great-idea/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:12:55 +0000 Matt Eagar http://morecontrol.com/?p=592

The CEDIA Expo starts tomorrow, so we expect this to be a big week for home automation and remote control news. To get things started, Global Caché has announced its new iTach line. Similar to their existing GC-100 products in basic functionality (connecting an infrared or serial device to your LAN), the iTach has added Wi-Fi and infrared learning to the mix, which makes the iTach more suitable as a bridge between hand-held Wi-Fi devices (such as the iPhone) and your home theater equipment.

From a hardware perspective, this makes the iTach awfully similar to our RedEye remote control. Both have IR learning, and both work over Wi-Fi. The iTach has 3 built-in IR emitter jacks, whereas the RedEye is an IR blaster (a $45 add-on to the iTach). Overall, we think the iTach hardware is heading in the right direction.

We have to part ways on software, however. Currently there are a few companies that have written iPhone applications to work with Global Caché devices: Cremote’s Bobby, tin:b’s iRedTouch, and CommandFusion’s CF iViewer. While it is great to have some diversity of choice here, if there is a lesson we can learn from Apple, it is that products which integrate both hardware and software into one package are easier to use and can provide a more innovative approach than systems that must be purchased from (and supported by) multiple vendors.

I recently wrote an article about why cell phones can make great remote controls — as long as we don’t try to exactly mimic the way traditional remote wands work. I firmly believe that simply turning the iPhone into a touchscreen version of your TV remote is a losing proposition — it introduces new problems without taking advantage of new opportunities. I also believe that in order to take full advantage of new opportunities, it is important for the entire system — hardware and software — to be designed as a cohesive whole. There is a reason we included a charging dock on the top of the RedEye, and there is a reason that it is an IR blaster rather than just having emitter jacks, and there is a reason we chose to use Bonjour networking protocols to discover the RedEye device on the network rather than manual entry of IP addresses.

The iTach goes a long way to fixing some of the issues with the GC-100 — supporting multiple clients simultaneously, adding Wi-Fi, and including IR learning — but until it is fully integrated with the software applications that drive it, there will always be something lacking.

A couple of days ago Total Telecom ran an article by Dow Jones’s Roger Cheng about how mobile phones are becoming TV remotes.

This kind of convergence is all fine and good — I think it’s great that we finally have mobile computing devices that connect to more than just the voice network — but these implementations overlook the issues that turning a handset into a remote control creates. They also overlook the opportunity to do something truly innovative.

Consider that when the remote control transitions from a shared device attached to one room to a personal device that goes with you from wherever you are, there are unique challenges. What happens when you are watching TV with a couple of other people and the phone that was controlling the TV set walks out of the room because a phone call came in? Can someone else open up her phone and change the channel or turn off the system? How much work does she have to go through to do so?

Or consider the implications on battery life for the remote control. Remotes today last weeks or months on a couple of AA cells, but a mobile handset might last a day or two on standby — just hours with the screen turned on. So we put our phones to sleep. But that means in order to turn on the TV we have to turn on the phone first — and we probably have to open up that remote control app, too — so what used to be one step-simple is now slow and cumbersome.

I’m not saying that these are insurmountable problems — if they were, we at ThinkFlood would be on a fool’s errand with the RedEye remote for iPhone. Rather, my question is whether the designers of these products have considered these implications and addressed them. For example, we solve the first issue by allowing multiple controllers (cell phones) to command the same system simultaneously — no easy feat when you start to think through how information has to be coordinated among handsets. We also allow one controller to control multiple rooms, have added a charging dock to the hardware, and so forth.

Of course for every problem there is also an opportunity. Infrared, wand-style remotes are 1970s technology, but these cell phones have the computing power of a mid-1990s desktop and Internet connectivity that approaches today’s wireless broadband. Surely there is something innovative we can do here that makes these systems compelling?

While we think multi-room, personal remote controls are compelling in their own right, what about adding some social media features? Sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, IBM is trying to patent that idea out of existence, as Gus Sentementes of The Baltimore Sun reported yesterday (and picked up today by Kit Eaton at Fast Company). Yes folks, this patent doesn’t guarantee that we will have an innovative new window from our remotes to our Twitter feeds and Facebook pages; instead it basically guarantees that it won’t happen. Because IBM isn’t in the business of making remote controls, and they aren’t going there anytime soon. Rather, this is IBM’s manipulation of the patent system for their own profit — allowing them to cash in on ideas without having to put forth the effort in development. Small companies that might have included functionality like this in their future plans (ahem) have to face the fact that it will cost them more money in licensing fees than they will ever recoup from their customers. Hardly the intention of the patent system as the nation’s founders envisioned it.

Thankfully there are plenty of other innovations open for the taking. Yes, cell phone remotes have a future — as long as they are more than just plain old TV remotes crammed into cellphones. That day will come soon — watch this space.

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.

Photo: Media Interaction Lab

Yesterday in ZDNet’s Hardware 2.0 blog, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes revealed that despite owning a Harmony One universal remote, he still hangs onto seven other remote controls to handle functions that he can’t squeeze into the Harmony setup. Of course the Harmony One has an infrared learning feature, but even so, there’s not always an appropriate place to put that extra function or two.

Adrian isn’t alone here. A few weeks back, Eric Taub expressed a similar sentiment in the New York Times’s Gadgetwise blog. It seems the issue is that most remote controls have a lot of buttons for all the different functions available, but on a “universal” remote, it’s impossible to have all of the buttons you need for every application — there just would be too many. As a result, universal remotes aren’t universal enough.

So, why not use a touchscreen and then configure software buttons for exactly what you need? The problem with touchscreens is that there is no tactile feedback — you have to look down at the screen every time you want to find the button to change the volume or switch channels.

So, hardware button layouts are too rigid, and software buttons can be annoying to use. What can we do? Some manufacturers choose to provide both — a touchscreen and some hard buttons. Even so, not all of these remotes allow customization of the touchscreen layout (which defeats the purpose), and you still are stuck with a fixed array of hard buttons, even if some of those buttons do not make sense all the time.

When we designed the RedEye system, we really felt that a touchscreen with customizable layouts was essential. But we also understood the concerns about having to look back and forth between the touchscreen and the TV all the time. To solve this problem, we decided to use the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures in place of hard buttons. With multi-touch gestures, you don’t need to look at the iPhone’s screen to invoke a function — for example, a two finger “swipe” upward anywhere on the screen will work — so you get the same benefit of a hard button. At the same time, gestures are a software thing, so they are fully customizable.

So, is the hard vs soft debate over? How do you like your remote buttons?

Earlier this week Erica Ogg of CNET wrote about Vizio’s plans to bring the Internet to its new Via HDTV sets. In addition to a LAN connection (802.11(n) Wi-Fi will be built into the TV), Vizio will be providing a bluetooth remote with slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Erica writes that, “The remote design is almost a no-brainer in retrospect, and makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done before.”

Hmm… not so sure. I like TV, and I like the Internet. Hey, I even like remote controls. But I’m not sure they all go together in this way.

First, there’s the history. The Internet on TV has been tried again and again, but it never seems to take off. That’s not to say that it won’t some day, but there are reasons. For example take WebTV, an old Internet veteran of some 14 years. Something of a takeoff on Steve Wozniak’s Apple I idea of using the TV as a computer screen, the goal of WebTV was to provide Internet access to people who didn’t care about technology enough to buy a personal computer but somehow could still afford the monthly service fee of $20. It came with a wand remote and a wireless keyboard — not integrated into one unit, but the same functionality that the Vizio remote provides. Microsoft bought them in 1997 and WebTV continues to exist today (as MSN TV), but it’s not exactly a mainstream trend.

More recently gaming consoles like the Wii and various TV manufacturers such as Sony have offered access to some Internet content through the boob tube, but owners of these products don’t seem to care all that much — assuming they know that the functionality even exists. Could it really be that adding a keyboard to your TV remote will make the difference?

I don’t think so. History aside, this is a problem of mismatched functions. Televisions are community devices — their large screens and speakers are designed for presenting information to many people at once. On the other hand, web browsing is a personal experience. In most cases, I don’t frequent the same sites that my wife does, and even when I do I am looking for different content most of the time. In fact, while I suppose I am one of those 30%’ers who “always or usually” surf the Internet while watching TV, that statement seems backwards. Most of the time I am watching TV while surfing — in the same way that I listen to music while doing the dishes, just looking for a bit of background noise as a diversion.

Erica points out that the folks at Vizio are steering clear of browsers per se, and I suppose that’s smart. But I don’t think I want Facebook all over my TV screen, even if it’s packaged up in a TV-appropriate format.

Here’s an idea: rather than pushing all that personal content to the TV for everyone to see, why not have a remote control with its own content screen that can deliver personal content to each viewer?

As MacNN reported yesterday, the USPTO recently granted patent 7,566,858 to Apple. This patent helps remote control systems “distinguish predetermined light sources from stray light sources” and relates specifically to the Apple TV.

Like the vast majority of home entertainment device remotes, the controller bundled with the Apple TV uses infrared signals. These are low cost and relatively easy to implement, but they have some issues. One is that infrared signals cannot penetrate opaque objects, and so require “line of sight.” Another is that there are other everyday sources of infrared radiation, so the “noise level” can be high, limiting effective range. Perhaps the most common source of infrared radiation is sunlight, so you may have noticed that your TV remote works better at night than when the sun is pouring in at noonday.

For simple commands (power on/off, changing the volume, etc), this noise is not much of a problem. But for more complicated applications — those sending more information in each signal — noise from sunlight or reflections from other remote controls can cause a problem, and Apple now has a patent on a method to remedy the situation.

What kinds of applications might these be? Glad you asked. The Nintendo Wii actually uses two kinds of technology in its remote controls. It uses Bluetooth — a radio frequency signal — to send information about button presses and accelerometer data, but it also uses good old infrared for motion tracking, as this (very cool) video from Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon shows:

Is this another spoke in the wheel of Apple’s possible plans to turn the Apple TV into a stealth gaming device, perhaps with iPhone or iPod touch controllers?