CANBERRA - A team of Australian experts has developed what may be the world's first interactive mouse for television.
The revolutionary technology will change the way people watch and use TV, the team at the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID) says.
Team leader Professor Duane Varan saidsimple hand gestures would replace button-pushing and frustratingly complicated remotes as the era of fully-interactive TV arrives.
The TV mouse is a clip-on device that enables the user to give commands to their TV with gestures.
"Once upon a time you had to type commands laboriously into your computer as hard text codes to get it to do anything - then along came the mouse, which greatly simplified and extended what you could do," Professor Varan said in a statement.
"As television becomes more and more interactive, viewers want to have greater control over what we see and do with it.
"We want the ability to give it commands in straightforward ways, such as with voice or gestures."
ACID's prototype gesture recognition device clips onto the hand.
It has accelerometers which measure the movement and orientation of the user's hand in various directions and a thumb-button to lock in the command.
Professor Varan predicted that, in time, it would replace remote buttons and arrow keys for record, stop, fast forward, menu and so on, with a series of gestures that are intuitive - like a hand up for stop, or palm-up for fast forward.
"In fact, we think we can go way beyond existing remote controls with a device like this," he said.
The team is currently fine-tuning the prototype device so it can recognise a wide variation in people's gestures - speed, extent and left-handedness.
Professor Varan also believes the gesture recognition device will accommodate natural gestures by the user without risking strain injuries.
