Slashdot Mirror
Interoperable Remote Controls
Lord Prox writes "From the HAVi website:
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? Or connected to a video telephone link so that the TV is muted and calls are answered automatically by a voice command? How about a video camera that automatically displays a picture on the TV screen when a visitor arrives; or starts a recording if the same thing happens unexpectedly during the night?"
Apparently 8 of the leading consumer electronics companies are trying to get rid of all those remotes and do some cooperation over IEEE 1394. Whitepapers and FAQ available."
Anyone notice that the companies participating in HAVi are all either European or Asian? If this standard survives, it'll probably take a while to get to the states ...
On a related note: philips already makes a programmable remote that you can program by pointing it at an other remote. You then press the button on the first remote and you can assign it to a button on the philips remote. Very handy.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Don't get me wrong, I think this would be cool, and I welcome the day when I can dispose of the 4 remotes I have (3 of which are Sony, and they still don't interoperate well). But in this day and age of DRM, I fear that the more we automate things, the easier it will be for those in power to legislate what we can and can't do with them.
Look at DVDs, for example. Sure, the picture quality and sound are miles ahead of VHS. But on VHS, I can fastforward through that FBI warning, and trailers. I can't do that with most DVDs. Nor can I skip chapters, or access the menu unless the disc decides I'm worthy. And I'm forced to watch the MGM splash screen, and some annoying intro that the DVD designers think looks cool. (Yes, yes, I know of the existence of mod chips and hacks for DVD players. That's not the point.) With DVD, the media (as in disc, not newspapers) controls the player, as opposed to the other way around with VHS.
The more we relinquish control over our equipment, in the name of automation and progress, the more we hand control over to another group. Is that the way it has to be? No. Is that the way it should be? No. But that's the way it is.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
This smells like the beginings of the semantic web approach to me..
:)
All devices should publish information about their capabilities using, for example, RDF.
When you answer the phone, anything that has exposed a "volume control" property could be muted until the call ends.. I hope they plan on using better security than WEP for the wireless links though..
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
when the tv is actually voice activated, whats to stop things like:
(loudly spoken from the TV) TV Stop Recording, VCR Stop Recording, Stop Recording, DVD/VCR erase media.
wonder how much a station would have to get paid before it started running ads that had
"watch KPr0n, just by saying TV Switch to channel 69"
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? "
No. Talking to inanimate devices in my home is something I do not what to do, and while cute, gets REALLY OLD FAST.
Don't ever invest in anything that uses "voice recognition technology" as a selling point for a consumer product. It's all pointless and it sucks. Are you realistically going to sit there and listen to your SO talk to the TV?
The killer app for voice recognition technology is in automating call centers. The first person to develop transparent dialog with a computer will become a multi-billionaire as you've just found a way to eliminate tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs in front line technical support.
..don't panic
See these articles as an example.
And even with 5C content protection, the entertainment industry is STILL deathly afraid of the idea of delivering digital content to customers with full digital interconnectivity between their devices.
If not for them, we would have a single, clean FireWire cable, or no cable at all, connecting all of our devices, and enabling them to seamlessly communicate with and control one another. I would have thought we'd be there by now...
The thing I really hate about this HAVI stuff is that the CE companies are ignoring what the rest of the world knows about abstraction and layering network protocols.
You're missing the point to argue the merits of ethernet or 1394. The point is that this is a layer-4 protocol and should have nothing to do woth the physical or link layers. HAVI should be orthogonal to the physical layer.
Can you imagine the dark cave we would still be living in if TCP was somehow specifically bound to ethernet?
I think these HAVI guys are hung up on DRM, and feel that they might let the genie out of the bottle if they abstract the physical and link layers out of their protocols to run on any link layer.
As a result, this will wind up like previous CE standards effort and fail to provide a consistent interoperable system.
jeff