Sensors & Transducers
If you’ve got the motion
Motion sensors are set to change the way we enjoy our home entertainment, as Dave Rothenburg explains
T
here are market and technology trends at work now which will change the way we enjoy Home Entertainment over the next 5 years. Some of you are seeing it already. Home entertainment equipment is increasingly connected and online. Now, in addition to the hundreds of channels your Service Provider offers, plus your DVDs, your Video-on-Demand (VoD), and your recorded shows, you also get access to web-based entertainment, widgets, apps, games, and other services. Navigating, controlling and enjoying this explosion of entertainment and new services will push the traditional remote control to the limit, but things will change. To understand why this is so, we need to start by taking a look back to the early days of motion-enabled gaming. The Wii started a revolution in home
entertainment. Suddenly gaming was no longer simply pushing buttons or a joystick but rather your body became the game controller. That was a profound change for an industry and for consumers. As a result, you became part of the game, leading to a much more natural and immersive experience. This change was brought about by the availability of advanced MEMS motion sensors in small packages at price points suitable for the Consumer Electronics market.
Success in the gaming and mobile markets was driven by the effective delivery of a complete motion-enabled experience “out of the box.” They demonstrate how a market can explode when a valuable new technology is combined with unified hardware and software platform for developers to exploit.
As we watch the rise of new IPTV services, and the growth in shipments of
connected Digital TVs (DTVs) and Set-Top Boxes (STBs), we see the potential for another industry, the Pay TV industry, to leverage motion technologies and benefit by delivering more value, better entertainment, and more utility to consumers. But we also see a challenge: how does the PayTV industry deliver that complete motion-enabled experience out- of-the-box to the consumer? There are many different players in the Pay TV ecosystem and they each play a role in a complete solution.
Movea has looked to solve this
problem by creating MoveTV, a new SmartMotion solution for the Pay TV market. MoveTV provides Pay TV ecosystem partners with a single platform on which to create a complete motion- enabled entertainment experience for consumers. MoveTV is a unique in that it is a platform that advances and simplifies the integration of motion powered entertainment for Pay TV subscribers. For the first time, service providers, game and application developers, remote control and STB manufacturers, DTV OEMs and system integrators, can all leverage a unifying platform and easily incorporate motion control into their products using the company’s patented SmartMotion technologies.
The first motion technology platform to take an ecosystem approach, MoveTV offers an integrated suite of SmartMotion technology components tailored to the needs of different ecosystem partners. The MoveTV platform components work together seamlessly on the backend and are designed to be modular, giving ecosystem partners the flexibility to adopt different levels of motion-driven functionality and capabilities. The next revolution in Home Entertainment is ubiquitous motion-
enabled entertainment delivered through the TV by service providers and DTV OEMs.
Revolution demands evolution One of the most vital components in the new motion-enabled living room is the remote control. A new breed of remotes is arriving on the market that can detect human movement through the use of MEMS inertial sensors: micro- electromechanical gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers. These are now coming in packages of a few square millimeters at an incremental hardware cost of less than $5 for a 9-axis solution and those prices are continuing to drop and fast.
The SmartMotion remote control
reference kit, part of the MoveTV platform, allows the user to explore and evaluate its patented processing technologies using an innovative remote control design based on Texas Instruments’ RF4CE platform. Movea is currently the only motion technology supplier delivered out of the box with TI’s MEMS driven RF4CE platform.
In applying these MEMS sensors to deliver new capabilities, there are several stages of sophistication one can go to. The first is simple point-and-click navigation in two dimensions. This gives the intuitive ease of use that you would get from a computer mouse. Devices like this are already being deployed by major service providers and they enable users to interact more naturally with menus, web browsers and casual games on DTVs and STBs. The next step is to build on the basic point-and-click remotes to deliver gesture recognition capabilities. Gesture recognition allows simple hand motions to execute more advanced control functions on the DTV or STB. For example, ticks or
checks can be used to start a movie or select a picture. An “X” can be used to close a photo album or quit an app, etc. Movea has found that a simple database of less than 10 gestures can be employed to dramatically increase the efficiency of interactions needed to control a next generation DTV/STB UI. This improved interaction efficiency is measured by the time it takes to execute a series of common control actions with a motion remote as compared to the time needed to execute the same control actions using a traditional remote control. It takes much less time to whip through a series of interactions with a motion-enabled remote control. If it’s easier and faster, people will use it more, as indicated by the results of the study mentioned above. Libraries of gestures can be provided and then customised gesture databases can be created by service providers and application developers with the help of a MoveTV application called Gesture Builder, also part of the MoveTV platform. Service providers can even enable subscribers to create their own in-air signatures; user defined gestures for authentication. This ability to easily identify who’s watching the TV can be leveraged by service providers to enable: · Targeted advertising · Intelligent content recommendations · Parental control of TV content · Personalised favourites & preferences Since mass adoption of gestures as an interaction mode will be facilitated by standards, Movea is actively seeking to partner with industry leaders to define and develop a common set of gestures that be used across applications and manufacturers – effectively, a universal language of gestures. Gesture recognition can become even more sophisticated with 3D gesture
10 November 2011
Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
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