One of the biggest emerging trends in TV has nothing to do with content or hardware specs, but rather how we interact with it. In particularly, those interactions are set to become much more natural than pointing a remote at the screen and pressing buttons. Instead, our television sets, which will recognize our faces, will be controlled by our voices and hand gestures. Think Kinect and Siri, but built directly into smart TVs built by companies other than Microsoft and Apple.
One of those manufacturers is Samsung, whose new line of smart TV sets feature voice and gesture control , as well as facial recognition. In a video demo, the user asks the television to open a Web browser and then moves his hand to control the mouse cursor to navigate. The "click" paradigm of the desktop is replaced by the squeezing of one's hand.
The remote control isn't as good as dead just yet. It will be quite some time before a majority of consumers adopt these state-of-the-art new devices, and by then we'll probably be talking about even more mind-blowingly futuristic features that TV manufacturers will be working on.Ubuntu TV, the new offering from the makers of the popular Linux-based OS, also launched this week and uses gesture and touch controls for navigation through content. It will also pair with smartphones to allow touch based control and an enhanced screen experience .
Even with solutions as impressive as Samsung's gesture control, there's still good reason to keep a keyboard handy. Moving your hand to every individual letter on an on-screen keyboard and virtually squeezing it isn't exactly as efficient as traditional typing. The remote that comes with the Boxee Box does a good job of packing a full QWERTY keyboard onto the back of a simple remote control.
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