CRISTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces) is a research project in user interface that attempts to create a natural way of connecting with devices. The system offers a streaming video view of the living room on a tabletop, so users can can walk up to it, see the layout of the room and interact with the TV or the photo frame.
We wanted a social aspect to activities such as choosing what to watch on TV and we wanted to make the process easy and intuitive, says Stacey Scott, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a member of the project. A demo of CRISTAL was shown at the Siggraph graphics conference earlier this month.
The idea isnt completely novel. Microsoft showed off Surface, a multitouch display in 2008 that allows users to interact with it by using gestures.
Universal remotes have become popular in the last few years, but they are still difficult to use. Their greatest flaw, though, may be that they do not help quash those battles over who gets the remote. CRISTAL solves those problems, says Christian Mller-Tomfelde, an Australian researcher who is currently writing a book on research in tabletop displays.
It is a clever use of the tabletop as a world-in-miniature interface to control room elements, he says.
Scott and researchers from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences have been working on the idea for less than a year. It started when Michael Haller, the head of the Media Interaction Lab at the university, found himself frustrated with different remotes for each device: TV, radio and DVD player.
Every time you get a new device into the living room, you get a new remote with it, says Scott. And instead of difficult programmable universal remotes, this offers intuitive mapping of the different devices and home.
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