As someone in the business of advancing interactive television, I’d sure like to think so. And I was given some encouragement by a piece I read the other today in the New York Times headlined “Now, Electronics that Obey Hand Gestures.”
The piece reported on a range of upcoming new consumer technologies and products that will, in the giddy words of the author, potential become:
“…one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s.”
Well, in my book the television set is still “a device” so this onrushing revolution is also poised to change the relationship between Mr. Bundy and his Mitsubishi.
Because once a viewer is connected to his TV-set by hand gestures – the same way we are intimately bonded to our iPhones, except writ larger (like 52”-inches plasma-large) – we can safely consign our unengaged Idaho to the Museum of Viewing History.
The Times pieces makes it clear that the hand-to-screen nexus isn’t a futuristic fantasy:
“In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures.”
So let’s get back around to what this means to me as an evangelist for the power of interactive television in all its potential: as a viewing experience, spur to programming innovation, and marketing tool.
I am massively encouraged by this development as a powerful augury for the rapid deployment of interactive TV because it points to the welcome emergence of a new viewing behavior.
There are many stars that have to align for the mass availability of interactive television, and pretty much all of the blinking balls of gas in the firmament are ready. The technology and all the nuanced set-top integration is there. The standards and protocols are in place.
What’s missing? I believe one of the stumbling blocks is emotional, a lack of belief that viewers will move from a lean-back to the much-discussed lean-forward experience. That TV viewing can become, well, physical.
But innovations that profoundly re-shape the lean-back experience are around the corner. Soon we’ll have “…TVs from Hitachi in Japan that will let people turn on their screens, scan through channels and change the volume on their sets with simple hand motions.” And then there’s Microsoft’s Project Natal, a gaming system that “will require nothing more than the human body.”
Instead of a remote (and I mean that literally and figuratively) relationship between viewers and TV sets, technology is bringing us a new intimacy, a technological pas de deux. This new behavior and new set of expectations that are associated with it will change the landscape that interactive television lives and breathes in.
Suddenly, we won’t be the voice in the wilderness arguing that television must move beyond the current archaic, one-way relationship it has with viewers. Because we will be surrounded by a thrilling new marketplace filled with innovative ways to connect the hand to the screen.
Consider that the phone used to be a kind of lean-back instrument. You held it to your ear and talked and listened through a device whose purpose was to be a conduit for sound frequencies. Just as the TV set has always been a conduit for radio waves.
Then Apple came along and said hold on a second, the phone can be something far more than that. And wow pow, shazam , a new behavior was born; we touch and interact with our phones as if we’re all gripped by Jobs-inspired OCD.
I smell something in the air that says a similar phenomenon is about to happen with our television sets. In another context, David Pogue wrote “It is a very human, almost innate, urge — readers want to touch what they are seeking to learn.”
Interactive TV is the first innovation, actually, in the history of the medium that brings this primal instinct to life. That’s why it’s a revolution waiting to happen, and the decades long belief (and simultaneously, skepticism) embodied in the familiar locution “Not if, but when” is about to be answered by “Now.” And who’d have thunk that it would be companies in a whole other industry – the interface business – to complete the transformation?
Then again, isn’t that how change happens? The inevitable gets accelerated by the unexpected.
Hanft Projects – Agency to FourthWall Media
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