LG Electronics’ Magic Remote is one of the more divisive innovations the company has come up with. There are those who are kinda cool with it, and those who absolutely despise the thing, due to the extreme sensitivity of its laser-pointing navigation system.
Google appears to be in the former camp, for it looks as though it’s working on bringing a similar kind of remote control to the Google TV platform.
For the uninitiated, LG’s Magic Remote relies on Nintendo Wii-style motion controls to kind of guesstimate what the user is trying to point at on the screen. The idea is that by pointing and clicking, it saves you time as you navigate through the TV’s menus, but the actual experience leaves a lot to be desired. The overly sensitive cursor tends to fly around the screen with the slightest shake of your hand, and getting it to point at very small on-screen elements can be rather tricky. There’s also the fact that the cursor doesn’t always align with where the remote is actually pointed…
It’s fiddly, to say the least. That said, there are still quite a few people who praise the device.
However, Google seems to think that LG is onto something with this idea, even if no other TV manufacturer has decided to try and improve on the experience LG offers its users. Perhaps, it thinks it can do a better job than its rival.
“Now is the time to start thinking about pointing input,” said Google TV developer relations engineer Paul Lammersma during a keynote at Google I/O this week. There is no concrete update in the Google TV operating system to support pointer apps just yet, but the company is asking TV app developers to start thinking about adding support for the capability.
The decision appears to have something to do with Gemini, Google’s comprehensive AI platform that has also started landing on Google TVs. According to Lammertsma, “Gemini is changing the way we discover and stream content with voice, but how we use the remote is evolving too. Pointer remotes bring motion-controlled input to the big screen, unlocking faster user navigation across the Google TV Home page and within content-heavy apps."
The obvious question becomes, which Google TV hardware makers are considering building a pointer remote? So far, we’ve seen no indication of a desire to do this from any of Google’s top-tier TV partners, such as Sony, Hisense, TCL, Sharp or Xiaomi. In addition, streaming device makers such as Nvidia, Mecool and Walmart have never said anything about it either. There is of course the possibility that Google may want to build a pointing device for its very own hardware, the Google TV Streamer, which replaced the now discontinued Chromecast dongles of old. But there’s no confirmation so far as to who is doing anything in this direction.
Assuming someone does make a pointer-style remote for Google TV, we can only hope they do a better job of it than LG and make it a lot more accurate.
