I was reading Eddie Shin’s blog post about the HDTV window and though about how this technology makes use of other available consumer goods. I realize that was hardly the point of the original post that Eddie wrote, but the post got me thinking about how this HDTV window relies on other technology.
To quickly summarize the video, the window is simply 2 HDTV screens (or I suppose it could work with 1 or a billion of them) that are rigged to show footage from various locations asides from what is normally outside your house. This means a change of scenery whenever you feel like it, you can look at the mountains when you wake up or the slums of downtown, it doesn’t really matter. The magic of the device comes from head tracking technology that looks at where your head is in relation to the window to project a different image at any point in time. This means that the screens will behave more like a window, where if you move from side to side, you get a different “view”, maybe seeing further left, or seeing a little less of the scenery. An ordinary TV on the other hand just displays a flat image, much like a poster on a wall. No matter what angle you look at it, it is the same image.
What is interesting is that this device relies on a Nintendo Wii Remote control to achieve this goal. The Wii Remote can sense another device that is attached to your head to get this effect. Apparently it may be a necklace or something else, but I would assume they need IR LEDs to achieve this effect. (One can’t help but notice that this “technology” is a total ripoff of the Head Tracking demo put out early in the Wii’s release by Johnny Lee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw). It also requires an iPod Touch or iPhone to control the device.
Now the very quick question I thought when I read this was how narrow a scope are the makers of this software looking at? You need THREE pieces of fairly expensive electronics to even have any use for this software. So first you have to target users that have an HDTV (which isn’t too rare), an iPod Touch (which again, isn’t too rare), and probably rarer is a Nintendo Wii. Though they are all fairly popular devices, you have to have all three at once to run this. How target-able is his audience? You have to take into consideration that even among people who own the three devices, they won’t all be interested, some have real windows, others are too lazy to hang up their TV’s sideways and so on. Is this sustainable? Maybe for extra lunch money, but I can’t imagine this being anywhere near profitable.