At every holiday gathering – and, come to think of it, on a lot of regular days as well – you can count on someone falling asleep in front of the TV after a delicious meal and a few drinks. It’s really annoying, though, to sit down intending to watch something only to wake up a couple of hours later to find that you’ve slept through the whole thing. A couple of Manchester Creative Studio students aged 15 and 14 came up with the perfect fix that will ensure you get to watch all of the TV you want.

Their wearable design is called KipstR, and it was brought to life through Virgin Media’s Switched on Futures project. The 3D-printed wristband houses a pulse-oximeter which measures just how awake the wearer is. If Uncle Joe is wearing the KipstR and drifts off for a little kip (or nap, for those not fluent in British), the wristband acts like a remote for the TiVo and pauses or records the show. While the TiVo is recording that show, family members can feel free to grab the remote and switch over to something they like without fear of retribution when Uncle Joe suddenly roars back to life and wonders why his program isn’t on.

The students behind the design, Ryan Oliver and Jonathan Kingsley, were asked to work with Virgin Media in the refinement of the design. The wristband can mimic the remote control’s functions, but the KipstR could also be used to control other things around the house when the wearer falls asleep. If you live alone and are worried about wasting utilities, future versions of the technology could turn off your lights or turn down the heat while you sleep. The wristband could even record your emotional state and suggest TV shows based on your current mood…although we have to point out that extending your Little House on the Prairie marathon definitely isn’t going to get you out of that post-holiday emotional slump.

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In the 1960s, color televisions were gaining traction as the world’s premier form of entertainment. There were still some glitches, though, as frustrated lazy viewers worried about having to get up repeatedly to adjust the volume, channel, or picture settings. The very first television remote controls debuted in the mid-1950s, but this 1961 commercial from RCA made the concept seem downright sexy.

Full of dramatic flair and a lovely, enthusiastic model to demonstrate the thrilling technology, the commercial puts emphasis on how to work each of the controls. To a modern mind – one that has dealt with mega-remotes for years – the instructions are tedious and simplistic. But when the commercial was released, not many households had experience with such a luxury.

One of the features of the TV that we really love is the storage compartment for the remote. Just like everyone’s dad used to say, when you aren’t using the remote it should be on (or in this case, in) the TV so you can find it next time.

(via Wired)

The post A Very Dramatic Look at RCA’s ’61 Color TV Remote Control first appeared on Gajitz.

Misplacing the TV remote is a frustrating – if minor – occurrence of modern life. If only your remote control could take on different shapes and sizes as needed, or simply attach itself to less-mobile items like tables or lamps to avoid getting lost in the living room clutter. That’s the idea design student Cleo Jacquet came up with for a design lab called Lazy Bytes. The name of the lab is a reference to Lazy Bones, the title of the world’s first remote control – the lab itself was an exercise in rethinking the design of the ubiquitous remote control.

Jacquet’s design is called Freehand, and it is little more than a pair of buttons that attach to other objects with a small suction cup. The device itself is tiny and likely to get lost immediately, but stick it onto something bigger – a beverage glass, perhaps, or a big vase – and it becomes much harder to lose. Clearly the design would need to be expanded and refined quite a bit before becoming a viable retail item (because who has a two-button remote control these days?), but it is a great example of how designers are moving the world toward more and more customizable objects all the time.

The post Reimagined Remote Control Lets Anything Control Your TV first appeared on Gajitz.

You know how annoying it is when you get up from your favorite TV show to make a quick snack, only to get sidetracked and miss a really good part? A team of developers is annoyed enough by this scenario that they’ve developed PredictGaze, a technology that can “see” when you’re sitting on the sofa watching TV – and when you get up to leave the room, pauses your show. It works in a pretty simple way: an inexpensive webcam mounted on your TV detects faces in the room; if everyone in the room gets up and leaves, the system pauses the show.

PredictGaze has other big plans for their technology, too. One of the most useful is an app that recognizes an iPad owner’s face. When the camera detects a face other than the owner’s, it blocks certain personal info (and prevents the stranger from accessing the owner’s Facebook account, which would benefit a whole lot of folks). The technology could possibly detect the ages of people in the room and block certain content for young viewers, although there seems to be a lot of room for error there. And just to ease the minds of those worried about privacy, the company says that all image processing is done locally and no user info is sent from the device.

The post TV Technology Pauses the Show When You Leave the Room first appeared on Gajitz.

There is plenty to be angry about when you’re watching TV: commercials, louder-than-necessary theme songs, and more commercials. The Smash Mute is a gigantic button that lets you shut up the television while taking out some of your aggression on an inanimate object.

The giant button is essentially a remote control with just one function: mute. When you smash the big red button with your fist, it turns the TV sound off until you smash that button again. You can avoid all of the worst parts of prime time without fumbling around for the appropriate button on your regular remote.

So maybe it’s not a Nobel Prize-winning concept, but it would make for a funny gift for someone who is always reaching for the “mute” button to silence those wicked marketing messages that interrupt TV time.

The post Silence! Giant Button Lets You Smash Commercials Quiet first appeared on Gajitz.