CRISTAL, or “Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces,” is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface in that it is controlled by touch-based gestures on a coffee table surface.  It is one of the coolest concept devices I have seen put to use.  CRISTAL allows you to control and manipulate various things in your living room space including TV, speakers, lights, a vacuum cleaner, and a digital picture frame.  The interface displayed on the table is a digital projection of your living room; it couldn’t be made any simpler.  To interact with your lights, for example, you can turn them on and off or even dim them with a sliding gesture on the table over the projected image of your actual lamp.  You can access your movie collection from a media server on the table.  You simply drag and drop a movie from the collection list to the table’s main interface; from there you can view the movie on the table itself, or–get this–you can drag the movie from the center of the table to the projected image of your TV and it will immediately play on your actual TV in your living room!  With photos, you can view and resize them directly on the table, and you can drag them to your TV or digital picture frame to view them on those devices.  And here’s my favorite feature: you can tell your miniature vacuum exactly where to go to clean up a mess by drawing a line from the vacuum to the messy destination.  Neat, huh?

Stacey Scott, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, member of the project: “We wanted a social aspect to activities such as choosing what to watch on TV and we wanted to make the process easy and intuitive.  “Every time you get a new device into the living room, you get a new remote with it.  And instead of difficult programmable universal remotes, this offers intuitive mapping of the different devices and home.”  Christian Müller-Tomfelde, an Australian table-top display researcher: “It is a clever use of the tabletop as a ‘world-in-miniature’ interface to control room elements.”

Müller-Tomfelde commented that it could take five to ten years before we see something like this be manufactured and made available for the general public.  As we have witnessed with Microsoft Surface, it can be very difficult to create and promote a table-top device with a steep price tag.  Scott approximated that if CRISTOL was put on the market today it would cost somewhere between $10,000-$15,000.  Today’s digital living room is packed with multiple devices that all perform different tasks.  A device like CRISTOL that can put the control of all those devices onto one central table-top with a user-friendly interface would be a very helpful and exciting addition to homes all around the world.

[Via Wired]