Remember those camera-inclusive televisions unveiled by Samsung at January's CES, which have caused no shortage of controversy, along with at least one humorous (albeit arguably sexist) commercial? Well, Samsung's just released v3.5 of their associated SDK for third-party developers, which supports (among other things) not only Samsung's proprietary IDE but also the Eclipse IDE and emulator. And of specific interest to those of us in the embedded vision field is the following excerpt of the SDK description:
Smart Interaction: Control. Navigate. Be recognized. Smart Interaction lets you interact with your TV as never before. A simple gesture is all it takes to access your favorite movies, sports, apps and other Smart Content.
SDK support for the televisions' voice input facilities is also included in the v3.5 SDK update, by the way:
With voice control, your voice is all you need to turn on your Smart TV, navigate menus and get to your favorite Smart Content. Say what you want and let your TV do the rest.
Apparently the folks at Rovio got early access to the SDK, or else they're just really fast coders, because a week and a half later Samsung announced that it'd be bringing gesture interface-controlled Angry Birds to its Smart TVs. Quoting from the release:
The game’s fun and colorful characters and engaging gameplay have made it beloved by fans around the world. Since its launch in November 2009, Angry Birds has been downloaded more than one billion times, across multiple platforms and all versions of the game.
Livingroom killer app? Perhaps!
