TeleTouch: Turn your smartphone into a truly universal remote control

Most of the people readingExtremeTech — yes, you! — will have grown up in living rooms featuring no less than four or five remote-controlled devices: VHS VCRs, big-box TVs, hi-fi sound systems, satellite/cable decoders, and eventually DVD players. Over time, the number of gadgets that we interact with has increased, but the amount of remote control that we have over the gadgets in our lives has lessened.

Why can we not turn our PC on or off from a distance? Or the microwave, or the bathtub, or the hallway light? There are two main reasons: a) cost, and b) can you imagine how many remote controls you’d have? What we really need is a universal remote control — and not the programmable, infrared variety that ostensibly let you control your entire living room media stack, but rarely worked as advertised. Fortunately, Pranav Mistry, a researcher at MIT Media Laband creator of SixthSense, seems to have found a rather ingenious solution: a smartphone universal remote control.

Now, a centrali ed “smart home” computer controller isn’t something new — wired- and wireless-control light fittings and thermostats have been toyed with for decades — but rest assured that Mistry’s solution isn’t a matter of using your smartphone as some kind of thousand-buttoned control panel. Instead, he has combined two simple and well-understood areas of technology — WiFi and computer vision — to turn a smartphone app into a universal remote control: just point your phone at an appliance, and then control it by tapping on your screen.

Dubbed TeleTouch (he may have some trademark issues with that name), the app uses the smartphone’s camera and computer vision to work out what you are pointing at. The app looks up the IP address of the identified device, brings up the relevant control interface on the smartphone (on/off, up/down, which channel?), and then uses WiFi to control the appliance. New Scientist says that Teletouch can also control devices that are out of view, so presumably it does have an “every device in the house” control panel as well.

Of course, Teletouch will run up exactly the same issue as other smart home/smart grid installations: appliances — lights, irons, fridges, alarm clocks — are inherently dumb. They need to be outfitted with an on-board computer and WiFi connectivity before Teletouch can interact with them. Still, the idea of pointing your smartphone at a device that you want to control is definitely desirable — gesticulating wildly and making demands is very human — and it adds a level of context that is sorely missing from today’s disembodied, everything-on-a-screen interface.

There’s also the fact that many of today’s devices already have WiFi built in — your laptop, your video game console, your TV — and presumably, when Teletouch is publicly shown off in February 2012, you’ll be able to download it and finally do away with most of your dull, matte, noninteractive IR remote controls.

Read a (bit) more about TeleTouch at MIT’s Media Lab

 

TeleTouch: Turn your smartphone into a truly universal remote control