Samsung wants to add gesture-based smart home control to your TV

Samsung is reportedly preparing for a smart home control interface that uses your smart TV to recognize basic hand gestures, directed at the objects you actually want to control. So, for example, it would allow you to point at a lamp to turn it off or on, or to other nearby objects to affect them in different ways. The shift is a bit of an extension of what Samsung already offers, which is basic gesture control of their smart televisions, but turning the TV itself into a sort of smart home hub. 

In a few years, Samsung Electronics‘005930.SE -1.42% new Internet-connected TVs might come with an extra function that you may not  have expected: switching on and off living room lights. “It will be a new interface that drops the usage of cursors, allowing the user to point to objects that exist beyond the TV screen,” Kim Seok-joong, the chief executive and founder of the start-up behind the technology told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. Kim and his company, VTouch, are currently in talks with Samsung, bidding for a deal to supply a gesture-control software solution to the world’s top TV manufacturer. The Seoul-based startup also recently won an undisclosed amount of investment from another Samsung affiliate. A Samsung Electronics spokesman declined to comment.