TELEVISION CEASED to be a box in the 1980s, and an idiot at the turn of the century. Smart TVs are gaining marketshare so fast that many companies are thinking about stopping the production of dumb ones. In September 2018, the sales of smart TVs in India overtook that of the non-smart TVs for the first time. Over-the-top services, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, and cheap internet plans have been fuelling this change.
Smart TVs are still evolving. It is not just the software upgrades that they get every six months, but also the changes in the core functions. In 2017, Lancaster University in the UK developed a technology called Matchpoint system which made it possible to interact with screens through gestures or body movements. It does not track a particular body part, but uses a system called spontaneous spatial coupling to recognise specific movements. So if you make a gesture while holding a teacup or a book, it will still recognise the command.
A month ago, the Swiss arm of Samsung Electronics, the world's largest TV maker, created a smart TV software you can control with brainwaves. The prototype uses brainwaves (collected with sensors) and an eye tracker to determine the selection. Equipped with machine learning, the system builds and keeps updating a profile of the user to make things faster in the future. Samsung will start testing the TVs in the first quarter of 2019.