Switch Off Living Room Lights With Your TV?

In a few years, Samsung Electronics' 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 said. VTouch executive testing the company’s gesture-control software.

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.

For Samsung, television sets have long been in need of a makeover that goes beyond adding curves to its design. TVs, which accounted for 17% of the company’s fourth-quarter revenue, haven’t been a profit driver for the company in a long time because of low margins and stiff competition. To bolster the company’s overall consumer electronics business, Samsung has been touting the concept of what it calls the “Smart Home,” where all electronics devices connect to each other over wireless networks, allowing the user to control them from remote places.

[March 11]