Ruwido, our favourite high end remote control developer, was showing the R157. This replaces the silvery look of other remote controls with a copper look. Ruwido doesn’t make STBs, but develops industrial designs that can be used by its STB customers. The R157 includes voice functions and supports Nuance voice technology – local or cloud-based. The big push is to try to make this more of a natural language interface than current technology can deliver.
There are developments in the firm’s “Leaf” interface which is based on HTML5. Design changes have been made after more research which showed that it is important to reflect the user’s visual system. For example, long lists are always difficult to navigate. A sideways swipe on the remote accelerates a “sliding” bar of channels, but at a certain speed, the user’s eye can’t track, so the interface changes to show the channels sequentially at a single location, even though the bar is still sliding by. Managing this kind of effect is important where different users have a range of hardware. Although Ruwido likes to support hardware acceleration, it needs to degrade gracefully where the hardware in not so powerful.
