Start-up takes pointer technology a step beyond what the Wii does | View Article
By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News 

It isn't often I do an interview in a living room. But you don't have much choice at ThinkOptics. The living room serves as the company's headquarters as well as the home of John Sweetser, a co-founder of the San Jose start-up. It has only three people, but they've got a lot of experience and some big dreams.

The home setting is totally appropriate. ThinkOptics has made a pointing system for the computer and TV that makes the Nintendo Wii game console's newfangled controller look downright primitive. Their device, the WavIt 3D Media-PC Remote, is an indicator that wireless pointing devices are getting better and better.

The three founders are launching the device Tuesday as a remote control for a Media Center PC. But that's just the beginning. The founders say they're talking to some big consumer electronics companies about making the WavIt a navigation device for all sorts of gear.

"We try to bring simplicity to the 10-foot experience," said Anders Grunnet-Jepsen, co-founder and chief technology officer, referring to the typical distance between a viewer and a TV.

You point the WavIt remote control device at a TV and the cursor shows up on the screen with great accuracy. It has both radio frequency and infrared sensors. You can turn it sideways and it functions as if you were turning up or down a control knob, such as an volume control.

The WavIt uses a technology called Visitrac; it tracks where you are pointing, whether you are twisting the remote, your distance from the screen, and the angle you're facing. The result is that you can point this device as accurately you can a laser pointer.

It can be used as an easier way to navigate through Media Center PC menus or TV menus as well as a presentation pointer. Up to four people can use four different WavIt remotes at the same time, paving the way for multiplayer games in the future. If Microsoft needs a way to make the Xbox 360 a rival to the Wii, it need look no further than ThinkOptics.

You can program the remote to control other devices, too. You can use it to turn on a DVD player, raise or lower the lights or control the temperature in your house. The device has an anti-shake stabilizer in it so you can pinpoint things accurately even if your hand is shaking. With the Media Center menus, you can use the device to navigate through a lot of movies more easily than you can with a traditional remote.

I didn't get to see a live demo of how it works with games. But the ThinkOptics guys showed videos of how you could use it to control games such as "World of Warcraft" or "Battlefield 2." Some of the functions looked interesting. You could twist your hand, for instance, to strafe from side to side.

The product is impressive for the work of just three guys. But they've been working for more than three years on the start-up, which they've funded by themselves and through an angel investor. Their families think they're crazy.

Gopal Panchanathan is the chief executive. Grunnet-Jepsen is the chief technology officer. Sweetser is vice president of engineering. They were kind enough to offer me doughnuts, so I figure their angel investor must be well-heeled. They wouldn't tell me who it was, though. Panchanathan is a former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center research portfolio manager and the other two are optics experts.

They've been testing their product design for about 10 months and have a version that is ready to sell. Pricing will be revealed Tuesday. The device uses the 2.4 gigahertz band of the radio spectrum and the Zigbee 802.15 wireless protocol, a standard for controlling wireless devices, so it won't cause a lot of interference with other radios.

At the moment, it differs from the Wii in that it doesn't have accelerometer chips, which can measure acceleration, and it doesn't use the Bluetooth radio system. The ThinkOptics device range is about three feet to 25 feet, compared with about three feet to eight feet or so for the Wii. The device can detect distance from the screen with sub-millimeter accuracy. The heart of the device is an eight-bit microcontroller and a digital signal processor. The company will have the pointer on display Tuesday at the Connections conference in Santa Clara.

We'll see if they can outdo the Wii controller in real applications. For a couple of bucks, the ThinkOptics folks could add an accelerometer chip like the Wii has. Certainly, pointing technology is going to get better over time.