Universal Remote With Programmable Button Labels

When a remote control for a piece of equipment is purpose-built for that device, the remote's buttons have functions that exactly match the functions of the device, with labels that clearly indicate those functions, and in many cases with a shape that represents the function (for example, a forward button in the shape of a right arrow). In addition, the buttons provide tactile feedback.

It's hard to beat those ergonomics, except that the coffee table winds up cluttered with a bunch of dedicated remotes.

To consolidate the remotes into a single remote, users turn to universal remotes.

Universal remotes fall into three categories:

• Assignable hard buttons with permanent labels, and no display.
• Assignable hard buttons with permanent labels, plus a touchscreen/display.
• No hard buttons, just a touchscreen/display.

There are drawbacks to all of these approaches.

If a universal remote has only hard buttons, then it must have a gazillion of them in order to support every possible function. This degrades the ergonomics of the remote because now it is a giant unwieldy wand cluttered with way too many buttons, only a small subset of which apply to any particular piece of equipment.

In addition, because there are always functions for which no button exists on the remote, manufacturers have to provide generic buttons (F1, Spare2, etc.), but then the user has to remember what functions are assigned to the generic buttons, because the labels are of no help, nor are the button shapes.

If a universal remote has a touchscreen/display, this allows manufacturers to have hard buttons for the most-common functions, with the touchscreen/display handling whatever is missing.

But this also degrades the ergonomics of the remote. Touchscreens don't provide tactile feedback, and they're not as crisp as hard buttons. (Users with touchscreen remotes will tell you they love soft buttons, but what they're really saying is they are willing to put up with soft buttons if it means they only have to have one remote on the coffee table.)

Manufacturers try to perfect universal remotes by varying the ratio of hard buttons to displayed buttons, trying to find the right mix. The problem is, there isn't really a right mix. Something is always a bit off.

But there is a fourth approach. Instead of having a touchscreen/display in order to have a way to define "buttons" that aren't represented by the available hard buttons, make each hard button a little display itself, and use that display to change the label on the button.

There are already keyboards that do this, for example http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus and http://www.unitedkeys.com. There's no reason it wouldn't work for remotes as well.

Another advantage of this approach is that it doesn't need a backlight.

The remote could still have a display for miscellaneous information, but now it could be just a few lines of text, and wouldn't have to be a touchscreen.

This approach doesn't solve the button-shape problem, but perhaps the set of buttons that benefit from having a special shape is small enough that they could be in the set of hard buttons from the start: skip left, rewind, play, forward, skip forward, up, down, left, right, page up, page down, channel up, channel down, volume up, volume down, maybe a few others (jog shuttle--does anyone still use that?).