Evaluation of a Vision Based 2-Button Remote Control for Interactive Television

This contribution presents a new vision based remote control for interactive television (ViBReCIT) and DVD players. This device is easily and intuitively used due to its vision based pointing ability in combination with only two push buttons. The purpose of this remote control is to use a pointer based scheme for menu selections on the television screen. For this purpose a low-resolution, low-cost camera is integrated on the front side of the remote control beside the IR transmitter. Using the images obtained from this camera, an estimate of the remote (i.e. camera) movement is made. This estimate of camera motion is used to control the pointer position on the television screen. We have implemented both absolute tracking and relative tracking algorithms for motion estimation and have evaluated their performance with respect to this application. An experiment is presented which evaluates this interaction style by comparing it to the status-quo arrow-keys based remote controls. In the experiment participants strongly preferred ViBReCIT over the arrow-keys based remote control, as ViBReCIT not only increased browsing speed through the menu structure but also was more user-friendly.