Philips presents intuitive iCat concept for the home
Human-like user-interface for easy access to your digital world

Philips has introduced a new consumer product prototype, 'iCat', a user-interface that provides natural human-like interaction to help you in your daily tasks such as sending messages, accessing daily information, selecting your favorite music, photos and video or even guarding your home.

The iCat prototype that is currently tested by people in the Philips Research HomeLab, serves to demonstrate the capabilities of a future consumer product called 'Smart Companion' that will act as a companion in the home and provides an easy to use interface to the digital world, similar to the well known mouse as interface to the PC. iCat's interaction style is modeled after communication between humans. By employing advanced technologies such as speech recognition, computer vision, robotics and animatronics, iCat exhibits a true 'personality'. It interacts with the user in a natural way by understanding spoken requests, giving replies, recognizing faces or everyday objects and by using body language such as facial expressions, nodding and other head movements. This makes it fun to interact with iCat and more than just a device controller, iCat becomes a true companion that assists the user and joins user's experiences.

iCat is connected via USB to a standard PC for processing power and storage capacity. Its intelligence is made possible by an advanced software architecture. iCat's autonomous behavior is driven by a set of internally simulated motivations and emotions, while its deliberation engine reasons about users, their activities and connected devices in the home. iCat can playback audio, photo and video content from multiple sources such as PCs, Internet or other storage devices. Furthermore, the broadband Internet connection can be used for all kind of possible future consumer services such as messaging, information retrieval, remote monitoring or home surveillance. Philips Research is extending her work on user-interface robots and is building a research community together with universities and research laboratories on this topic. The HomeLab is the best location to actually work with people and technologies to register and understand preferences and market opportunities.


(06.05.2005)

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