Samsung MediaSquare makes watching TV a social experience
It allows everyone in the room to share photos and videos easily.
Samsung's MediaSquare can either transform a boring party into a fun one or make you want to punch the asshole in the room. The user interface allows everyone to control and interact through a TV, you see, replacing remote controls with everyone's phones. For instance, you and your friends can flick videos, music tracks and photos to the TV all at once, which appear as floating elements on screen. Anybody can switch the music being played or even adjust the volume either through a phone or through a smartwatch. If that sounds hard to envision, the video below the fold can show you exactly how it works.
MediaSquare isn't one of the technologies Samsung launched at CES, though. At the moment, it's merely a concept being developed by a team led by former MIT Media Lab researcher Jinha Lee. There's no concrete release date, and the tech might be vastly different by the time it's ready for consumers.
He told Fast Company in an email:
There was this moment when I was having a coffee chat with my family, and during the conversation, my mom said she thought of something and would like to show it to us, then picked up her phone, spent some time finding something on her phone, and sent it to rest of us via mobile messenger! This was when I realized something was fundamentally going wrong here.
The South Korean native is no stranger to developing experimental UIs: a few years ago, he conjured up a 3D interface concept called SpaceTop. You can control the AR-like elements on SpaceTop's semitransparent screen by holding and moving them with your hands.
