Not another app: ruwido demonstrates why remote controls will not be replaced by mobile apps at Mobile World Congress

Neumarkt, Austria – 2015-03-02 – At this year’s Mobile World Congress ruwido will discuss the findings of its applied scientific research, and the importance of simple, straight forward navigation in the living room. Focusing on user experience, ruwido’s research is leading to the development of innovative input devices and the evaluation of new forms of interaction in the TV landscape.

Today’s users have become accustomed to a high standard of comfortable and easy interaction on their mobile devices, and are expecting even more of the same high quality for TV navigation in the living room. But the assumption that mobile apps will replace modern input devices cannot be verified. ruwido’s research findings show that mobile devices and remotes serve different needs and therefore do not compete with each other in terms of TV navigation. While apps on mobile phones and tablets are fantastic for searching, surfing and social media, they are not appropriate to navigate today’s increasingly complex TV experiences. The control of a user interface from three to five meters distance is a different activity that users perform most often blindly. Haptic feedback stays of central importance for control, and as a separate physical device the remote is specifically built to serve the needs for intuitive navigation.

‘We recognize that control apps on mobile devices interfere with other activities like texting, incoming calls and social media, and as a result users tend to get lost and do not know which screen to look at. Today it is vital to make content easily accessible and

to keep navigation as simple as possible for the user,’ says Ferdinand Maier, CEO, ruwido. ‘Furthermore, mobile phones and tablets are private devices and designed for individual use. With TV still very much a social event, navigating the TV experience needs to happen through an open, public device that can be easily passed on to others and that is not being occupied by other tasks.’

In order to achieve seamless TV navigation it is imperative to provide powerful interaction mechanisms that serve the intrinsic need for usability and utility. The time where one button served a single function on the remote control has passed, and there is a visible trend towards multimodal input devices, with clear and reduced designs. ruwido will demonstrate at hall 1, stand 1a40 its award-winning portfolio of innovative input devices that are a joy to own and a joy to use.