The Idea
How can AI improve TV experience while making it fun and user controlled? This question requires research of course but also a test to feed the first question with other questions and make the experience better and better. It takes for a UX designer not only to think user-first but also AI-first.
Over the past few years, because of more and more OTT and streaming providers, the users have now entered in an infinity loop of content, spending more and more time browsing Amazon Prime, Netflix Hulu as well as the TV provider wasting a lot of time trying to make a decision leading to frustrations more and more. The Smart Ball concept is here to remove the user’s frustration and hesitancy.
The concept is quite simply a stress ball, connected to the user’s content provider data base, leverage all movies and series metadata associated to the content as well as User’s data from previous content consumption content data. The ball itself, would also host a few captors able to identify motion, temperature, light, pressure, sound…
The experience
The ball
Based on this sources of Data, we can imaginer different scenarios like, the user squeezes the ball, their TV screen will show a selection of 4 thrillers; The user caresses the Smart Ball, the TV shows Romantic movies; they make the ball bounce on the floor, they will be presented with Action movies, etc…
Conclusion
Through this research and design, I learned more about AI and the risk of disconnection, feeling of manipulation for the user created by cold data. I learned that AI, is not also about the objectivity of the data but what a content make someone’s feel. By giving control to the user of their own data, we give them a new human way to watch TV, facilitate and personalize how we watch TV and it could create a playful experience for the whole family to decide what best movie to watch together.
Unfortunately, this project developed few years ago, did not go anywhere as IoT was not what that company was looking for when came the time to test it.