Interactive TV and Motion
October 5, 2013, IEEE Communications Society and Consumer Electronics Society, Santa Clara, CA—Tim Kelliher from Movea talked about adding motion control to TV to allow the smarter TV to change the user interface and increase interactions. Increasingly, the user interface is deemed outmoded as people have become accustomed to the tablet and smart phone interfaces.
Movea is a spin-out from CEA- Leti and develops motion sensing IP and software. The resulting data fusion IP and tools allow the smart TV to do a better job of surfing the Web, playing interactive games, navigating for contents, and doing social media functions. The new capabilities of touch and gesture allow changes in the user interface.
Motion-based interactions need a full 6-degrees of freedom sensor array to perform well. The needed accuracy calls for a accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope to manage the location details. The gyroscope gives 3-degrees of freedom but is the first derivative of orientation and subject to noise and drift.
Adding the 3-axis accelerometer adds information on pitch and roll to give readouts of 3-D acceleration plus gravity. However, this is not the same as position, which requires a mixture of gravity, acceleration, and magnetic heading information.
A demonstration project of a motion controller for set top boxes and digital TVs adds gestures and motion to the TV set. The system uses context-sensitive gesture recognition to emulate touch of a smart mobile device on the TV. The gesture data are transferred via RF interconnect to the set top box or TV. A 9-axis server in the STB handles calibration, flop definition, pointing, compensation, and maps sets of gestures to other functions like drag and click.
The technology is in some existing products in France, and new partners are looking at the concepts for other implementations. The changes in user interfaces is needed as more people come to expect their interactions with electronics of all type to be as simple and intuitive as their smart phone or tablet.
The slides from the presentation can be found on the IEEE SCV Consumer Electronics web site at : http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ce/meetings/comsec-ces/index.html
