TV Show “The Phone”. Next TV show: “SuperHouse”.

Control devices through TV.

Jon’s first rule of UI design:

• The best UI is no UI.
• Any place you can remove need to interact with system you make it better.
• e.g. suppressing screen saver when playing Movie.

How to make systems aware of a person being in front of it. TV should automatically pause when you walk out of room.

Need to detect if person is in front of TV:

• Motion detector - people in front of TV tend to be still.
• IR beacon - cheap approach.
• Bluetooth to detect signal from Phone.
• glyph detection - using camera to detect geometric shapes.
• Facial recognition. Ideal solution. Camera at TV. Libraries in Linux poor quality. Some Java code exists. Most ported from Windows. Many abandoned projects. Some commercial projects. A suggestion was given.
• voice recognition???

Question: but what if you want to leave the TV and have the show continue? e.g. you want to go and get a beer in the intro? Answer 1: do that before hand. Answer 2: You automated house should automatically retrieve a beer for you.

Walk out of the lounge room and into the kitchen and have your TV show follow you.

• Use bookmarks to define book mark when user moves out and play from bookmark when user moves in.
• Alternative use uPNP interface, supports playing at given time.

Question: How to not miss any of the show around time of pause? Answer: How to start playing X seconds from when it was paused.

Question: how to resolve conflicts? What if multiple people in same room? Answer: Priority scheme!