A universal remote control with haptic interface for customer electronic devices

We introduce a new universal remote control that gives easy-to-control interface for home devices such as TV, video/audio player, room lighting and temperature control. In order to use conventional remote controls, people need to understand complex instruction manuals and remember functions assigned to buttons. In addition, the button-based control does not provide an intuitive interface so the user presses a button several times to browse information and has difficulty in searching the right button among many buttons. Our universal remote control addresses these limitations by using a touch screen, a force-feedback dial knob, and two buttons instead of many buttons. We suggest an example scenario to interact with a conventional TV set, room lighting, and air conditioner using our universal remote control. The result of a user study to evaluate the usability of the device shows that the universal remote control is very efficient and intuitive interface to control customer electronics devices.