LAS VEGAS — Cisco is gearing up for the tablet to replace the remote control as the primary means for consumers to interact with TV. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Neil Cormican, Senior UX Design Manager at Cisco Systems, demonstrating how the company’s second-screen app would work in a video interview with Beet.TV. The app is not yet available for commercial use.
The second-screen app, known as Echo, is designed to blend TV viewing and tablet interaction. “We want to build an experience across two screens,” Cormican says. To achieve that, the top section of the tablet app appears as an extended piece of video from the TV with the rest of the screen a “content feed” for touch interaction. “It feels like one single experience across both screens,” he explains. Features include letting users peek at a sporting event on another channel while watching a game, for instance.
“Many users have these devices in their hands already and they are capable of delivering wonderful experiences and we think they can be reproduced for the TV,” he says.
