Smartware: Software for Smarter TV

by Jim Mikles
Summer 1998

Living Room Active
Suggested Retail Price: $49.95
Vidam Communications
www.vidam.com

One of the problems with PC/TV is how the computer image display wasn't meant to work very well on the television. Convergence software manufacturer Vidam has tackled this with Living Room Active, a PC/TV utility software package loaded with features to make your computer more TV-friendly and deliver the VGA output from your computer to a TV screen. Image enhancement makes screen fonts readable from 10-feet away, color correction keeps the colors meant for a VGA screen from confusing your TV, a display controller centers the computer-generated image on your television, a graphic zoom tool allows you to drag a magnifying window to increase the size of text and graphics, and to make sure your living room is still safe for the kids, a surf filter allows you to either block-out individual sites, or to only allow surfing from a pre-selected list. Living Room Active also has a variety of Internet functions and a TV Web browser that runs on top of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Web browser features a navigation map that shows all of the individual pages of a Web site, allowing you instant access to the page you want in any site. Living Room Active also features e-mail from Hotmail that is customized to work correctly on a TV. The package is rounded out by one-touch utilities that allow you to play movies and music from the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives of your PC.

Xpressed Talking Plug-in
Suggested Retail Price: Free
DirectXtras Ltd
www.xpressed.com

A big complaint about watching the Web on TV is that text, which is still the basis of most Web sites, is hard to read across the living room and doesn't make for very exciting television viewing. Until more sites are designed to accommodate TV viewers, there is Xpressed, a multi-browser, multi-platform plug-in that enables the Web to speak. Traditionally, speech on the Web has been handled with audio streaming, where speech is recorded and encoded, then played in one of the various streaming formats. The problem with this solution is you first must record what needs to be heard, and then send that large, bandwidth-hogging audio file across the Net. Xpressed is designed to run with Macromedia's popular browser plug-in, Shockwave. Xpressed avoids using recorded speech, and instead emulates human speech and reads aloud the text on a Web page or in an e-mail message. The Xpressed plug-in can work with all of your e-mail messages, but only on Web sites that have been properly imbued. There are a variety of voices to choose from, all of them pretty mechanical and monotone, but once you get used to it, listening to your Web browser talk while you lounge on the couch or do something else is liberating. By adding audio and eliminating the need to read lots of text, virtually every Web site could be more TV-friendly.

HAL2000
Suggested Retail Price: $299
Home Automated Living
www.automatedliving.com

HAL might seem an unfortunate name for a home automation software program, as it evokes images of the confused and ultimately homicidal computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not to worry. HAL2000, by Home Automated Living, may be smart enough to recognize speech commands and control every aspect of your home's lighting, heating, cooling, sprinklers and security system, but it has yet to demonstrate any malignant tendencies. Just don't give it the keys to the spaceship. HAL2000 serves as the "brains" of a multi-faceted home automation system and incorporates many of today's popular home automation hardware, including X-10 power modules. A software interface that recognizes voice, HAL2000 is designed to be TV-friendly with a graphic screen and easy-to-use menus. The voice recognition element is HAL2000's most unique feature. Type and store commands, or a series of commands, and then you can speak to HAL in person or by telephone to operate all of your home automation components. HAL2000 ships with the latest Gateway Destination PC/TVs.