I have one major complaint about the remote controls: the buttons wear out quickly. But what if they had few or no buttons? Is this possible? I began considering what could be done to make this happen, and came up with some ideas that I believe will happen in the future, if they haven’t already happened.
One solution is to make the remote like a mouse. The remote could be made to sense its position in space or on a surface, which might be less convenient. The cursor would be on the TV screen just like a PC. It would move through menus just like a PC, and could be implemented using open source OS such as Linux or Android.
I think this solution has several advantages. There would be very few electromechanical parts such as buttons. The interface would be intuitive just like a mouse. I can’t remember the first time I used a mouse; it was like, so easy it might have been an extension of my fingers, like a writing instrument. I think that the PC was an Apple ][ computer, because the others didn’t have a mouse.
Fewer parts means less cost, a plus for the manufacturer. But one of my biggest complaints is that the menu system is different for every TV brand and is horribly user unfriendly. Getting away from this and toward a more intuitive interface would be a major improvement.
The TV is already acting like a computer and computers are already serving as TVs, so it’s just a matter of time until the two are so similar they can’t be differentiated. So what should they be called? A TVC, or television computer? A telecomputer? An infotainer? I could name a few more but they sound like brand names of some equipment from the past. My prediction could miss the target. The remote could be more like the glasses that Google developed, especially if 3D vision ever becomes popular. Or the TV screen could become so large that the menus are always on the screen, along with multiple sources of information such as news and weather. The mouse may be replaced with gesturing using the user’s hands. There may be other possibilities. The user could become an interactive icon on the screen, and have to walk from one point to another on the screen – great for exercise.
We already have touch screens; I like them on hand held devices, but not on tabletop displays. I really can’t imagine having the TV screen so close that I could touch it, because that would limit the screen to a single viewer.
Back to the mouse. The current optical mouse has a sensor that senses movement on a surface. But as far as I know, the scroll wheel still uses a wheel with slots in it which breaks an IR beam between a LED and a sensor. Why not just add another surface motion sensor and have it sense the motion of the wheel? There will be less moving parts.
About 3D TV. An inventor has made a 3 dimensional image by projecting light into a haze or mist. They call it Displair. I’ve seen the 2D video of it, but not in person. It may be all smoke and mirrors, or at least mist and smoke anyway.
