Intel: Future TV Will Be Social, Interactive, 3D

Today at IDF 2009, Intel Digital Home Group GM Eric Kim demonstrated some new technologies that promise to revolutionize the home viewing experience sometime in the not-too-distant future.  For the past few years, the biggest development in TV has probably been the continued development of placeshifting technologies that let you view programming from a variety of devices and location. But today, Intel spent a lot of time showing interactive tools which its new media processors — including the just announced Atom CE4100 processor for embedded devices — will make possible in the living room.

Cool New UIs

At the start of the keynote, Kim performed a fun little skit in which he sat on a couch on stage and pretended to watch TV with a friend who was sitting on another couch in front of him, facing the TV. The two of them used a really attractive spinning program guide application to choose something to watch. Later on, we learned that though this programming guide is just a prototype, it is based on Macromedia Flash technology. The neat thing about the guide is that every square on it is moving, meaning that it is previewing thousands of channels at once.

New Ad Opportunities

Then Kim and his as-yet-unnamed friend decided to start watching an episode of Big Bang Theory. In the episode, one of the characters was using a Dell notebook and Kim’s friend asked him what kind of Dell notebook it was. Kim was able to hit a button and see information about the notebook displayed as an overlay on-screen, right below the content. This is a lot like the YouTube ads that appear overlayed over the bottom of content and Kim later touted this as a new form of contextual advertising.

Watching  Socially

Kim then changed channels to an episode of Star Trek and they were able to conference-in Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who appeared in a video conferencing window in a corner of the screen and began to discuss the show with Kim’s friend. This was a demo of the social potential of TV, something which Intel really wants to emphasize. In the future, set top boxes will allow users in different locations to watch episodes together and interact on-screen while the program is running.

As this initial demo drew to a close, it was revealed that Kim’s mysterious friend was actually Star Trek actor Levar Burton, who gave a quick speech about the value of innovation and then left.

Gaming On TV

Another innovation Kim spoke about was the ability to play high-quality games and have them delivered via a set-top box. He introduced Vujas Gupta, CEO of TransGaming, a company which makes software that enables game developers to easily port their PC titles to Mac and other platforms. Gupta said his company is launching Gametree.tv, a site that will allow set-top users to play popular game titles on their TVs. The service is expected to launch in the first half of 2010.

Image Recognition Allows More Interactivity

After Kim’s presentation was done, CTO Justin Rattner gave his own. One of the most compelling things he showed was a demo of image recognition software that Intel is developing. Intel Research Manager Yimin Zhang came on stage to show how Intel’s software can take images of a live sporting event such as a soccer game and recognize individual objects on the screen, like an advanced facial recognition application that recognizes more than faces. In the demo they showed, the software drew boxes around each individual player in a soccer game and then was able to identify each player and allow the user to get information about and see clips of them.

3D Content

At the end of his presentation, Rattner also demonstrated new 3D screens that allowed him to conduct a 3D video conferencing call that the audience could see with the aide of 3D glasses. A concert video of U2 was also shown.

Final Thoughts

All in all, it seems like the living room may finally be getting the level of interactivity we’ve been waiting for. The real question is how much longer we’ll have to wait.