What's more, this occurred after Amazon had previously tried to steal the new Apple TV's thunder by announcing within a week of the Apple TV unveiling that its new Amazon Fire TV box would support 4K video (which the Apple TV does not). More information on this can be found in my separate article here.
Now news emerging this week shows that the two companies are heading towards another potentially huge clash, this time over control of your home.
On the Amazon side, as Forbes' Aaron Tilley reports, the company has filed two patents associated with using augmented reality technology to turn your living room into a new 3D control space. On the Apple side a new power control device was launched that implements Apple’s HomeKit and Siri technologies to let you control your electronics devices just by talking to them.
Looking in more detail at the Amazon news, one of the two new patents refers to ‘object tracking in a 3-dimensional environment’ while the other is concerned with ‘reflector-based depth mapping of a scene’.
Taken together, the two patented technologies open up the potential for turning your living room into a three-dimensional digital space within which your body movements - even your position in the room - could enable you to interact with your devices or even holographic representations of objects.
Gesture control - but not as we know it
A supporting diagram suggests that the object tracking patent is particularly focused on enabling consumers to take control of their home entertainment and, potentially, home automation gadgets by moving their hands. This isn’t entirely new as a concept, of course; Samsung has offered gesture control on its TVs for years now. But the patent suggests a much more sophisticated gesture recognition approach that potentially introduces projected AR visual cues with which the user can interact, to make their movements feel more focused and intuitive.
The reflector-based depth mapping patent, meanwhile, would project computer-generated augmented reality images into your room - using, according to a supporting diagram, a projector fitted to your ceiling - to create a virtual control space overlaid over your physical room.
The patent's own words describe the idea like this: “A room equipped with computerized projection and imaging systems that enable presentation of images on various objects within the room to facilitate user interaction with the images and/or objects.”
Again, this concept isn’t wholly new;
These new patents for allowing you to control multiple electronic devices in your home without the need for any sort of remote handsets could be combined, moreover, with Amazon’s Echo ‘personal assistant’ technology, which supports sophisticated voice recognition software and can control your home’s heating, lighting and entertainment devices.
HomeKit gets real
Compared with the fairly ‘out there’ patents filed by Amazon, I guess the Apple developments this week look relatively small at first glance. Essentially a company called Grid Connect has launched new ConnectSense electrical plug sockets with integrated Wi-Fi that support control via Apple’s Siri voice recognition system. So you can turn products on or off with just your voice.
But that’s just the start of what the ConnectSense sockets can do. The Apple integration means, too, that you can monitor the energy use of any devices attached to a ConnectSense socket. Or you can control those devices even when you’re away from home through the ConnectSense app now available for the new Apple TV.
The really key thing about the ConnectSense sockets, though, is their leveraging of Apple’s HomeKit technology. HomeKit, if you’re not familiar with it, has been designed to provide a secure integrated wireless electronic control system - operated through the new Apple TV - capable of managing almost every aspect of your home. So the relatively straightforward HomeKit application demonstrated by the ConnectSense sockets is just an early toe-dip into what will surely become much deeper home automation waters.
What these new products and patents show is that Apple and Amazon both see the ‘connected home’ as a key future marketplace - which in turn means that it seems certain they’ll start to tread on each others toes again at some point in the not too distant future.
Where will it all end?
Whether this will reach the stage where Amazon potentially refuses to sell HomeKit equipment or Apple refuses to support Amazon ‘connected home’ features remains to be seen. But the tech optimist in me also sees a definite upside to the situation.
After all, whatever corporate-level sniping might end up taking place, where two such big tech hitters are both focused on the same goal we can surely at least hope for the rivalry to increase the rate at which this exciting new area of technology develops.
If you want more background on the Amazon decision to stop selling Apple TVs and Google Chromecasts, Forbes contributor Ian Morris has written an interesting article on the subject, while Matt Hickey has recently explained how Apple and Amazon might be on the verge of burying the hatchet over the Apple TV/Amazon Prime issue.
Also, click the following links for my articles on the pros and cons of the new Apple TV.
