CES 2013 ushers in TVs built for waving, pointing, and tapping

At CES 2013 Samsung, Panasonic, and LG trotted out their next generation of Smart TVs.?

By Ryan Nakashima,?Associated Press / January 9, 2013

Samsung unveiled a 110-inch 4k Ultra HD TV at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

Jae C. Hong/AP

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In the not-so-distant future, couch potatoes will be waving, pointing, swiping and tapping to make their TVs react, kind of like what Tom Cruise did in the 2002 movie "Minority Report." That's the vision of TV manufacturers as they show off "smart TVs."

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The sets will recognize who's watching and will try to guess what viewers want to see. They'll respond to more natural speech and will connect with your smartphone in a single touch.

The idea is to make TV watching easier and more pleasant as viewers are confronted with more and more choices ? from the hundreds of live TV channels from the cable or satellite provider to online video services such as Netflix Inc., Hulu and Apple's iTunes. A traditional remote control that lets you flip through channels one at a time suddenly seems inadequate.

At a speech this week, Samsung President Boo-Keun Yoon said the company was developing "TVs that have the power to create the ultimate lean-back experience."

But don't worry about "Big Brother" looking back at you. Manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co. will allow motion-capturing cameras to be pointed away.

Gesture recognition still has a long ways to go, and in some demonstrations at this week's International CES show in Las Vegas, voice commands got lost in translation.

At a crowded Samsung booth, one attendant demonstrated how hand gestures were used to play simple kids' games. Raising her hand brought up an on-screen cursor. Grasping the air was equivalent to clicking on what her digital hand was hovering over.

However, when she tried the same gestures on a menu of TV-watching options, the TV didn't respond well. When she tried to give a kind of sideways wave ? like Queen Elizabeth greeting her subjects ? the page didn't swipe to the left as it should have.

The technology appeared less responsive compared with the Xbox 360's Kinect motion-control system, which seems to do a much better job at swiping through menus.

Later, in a quiet, enclosed Samsung booth, the TV struggled to comprehend voice commands. The TV was asked, "find me a movie with Tom Cruise," and correctly pulled up an online trailer of his latest movie, "Jack Reacher." The system was then asked to "find me dramas." The command "Number 3" was given to choose the third option in the results, but the TV instead started a new search and offered a range of viewing options for "Sommersby."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/CtGh_h_b0s0/CES-2013-ushers-in-TVs-built-for-waving-pointing-and-tapping

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