Don't you get annoyed when some people try to reinvent the wheel and even claim their finding? Let's take the Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces, long for CRISTAL.

The CRISTAL is a research project in user interface that attempts to recreate a more of a natural way of connecting with devices (like that is more natural than standing up and touching the real one) that offers a streaming video view of the whole room so that users can interact more with the devices and get over the never ending battles over who gets the remote.

"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" says Stacey Scott, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a member of the project.

This sounds terrific, you might say. If you have lived without Internet for the past two years maybe and don't know about the Microsoft Surface, that not only supports multi-touch, but also understands gestures. Surface was introduced in 2008, but rumored a lot earlier.

Of course, the people at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences started working on their project less than a year ago. Reinventing the wheel and taking all the credit, my friends? The only things that they can pride themselves on are that birds-eye view and the stated ease of adding devices to be controlled when placing them around the room.

"Every time you get a new device into the living room, you get a new remote with it," says Scott. "And instead of difficult programmable universal remotes, this offers intuitive mapping of the different devices and home."

Whilst they say it could take five to ten years to get the CRISTAL to a consumer grade level (affordability, that is) since multitouch tabletops are so expensive for the moment (see Microsoft's Surface) but I do believe that it would take the software giant only a few years (not even close to five) to embed a better way of controlling devices around your room, not to mention that, in ten years, the Redmond-based company should be able to get the Surface in perfect shape and downsize the price tag, whilst the CRISTAL is estimated at $10,000 to $15,000.


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