HiTV encourages people to actively show what they think of the TV programme. They can toss a soft ball around or throw it to hit the TV when s/he doesn’t like the character or contents on the screen. As the ball hits the TV, the character inside the TV program will get visually distorted and scream.

The HiTV system consists of the soft ball and a signal box to process the TV signals. Sensors in the ball monitor the emotional reactions of the viewer, including patting, holding tight, or throwing the ball to TV. The signal box creates audio and visual feedbacks to the reactions, and it can be also connected to the network to share the reactions with others.

When touching, squeezing, or shaking the ball, the pitch and volume of TV audio can be adjusted. At the same time, certain visual effects, i.e. ripples, is overlaying on the original video. As the soft ball hits the screen, the accelerometer detects the collision and sends the signal through RF to the signal box within TV. The audio signals are processed as Sound Pitch, Sound Volume, Audio Effect Duration.

The stronger the ball hits the TV, the sharper and louder the original audio is going to be. TV users now can play with the ball in other ways, such as squeeze or stretch, which will act as different filters to the voice/sound of the TV.

A work by Jackie Lee, Chaochi Chang , Hyemin Chung, and Connor Dickie.

HiTV will be demonstrated at NEXT exhibition, Nordic Exceptional Trendshop in Copenhagen, Dec. 1~3, 2006.

More mad TVs: OITV (shown last year at NEXT as well). The “attention seeking” TV, developed by Mark Hauenstein, autonomously changes the channels, moves or rotates the image out of its screen, etc. when there hasn’t been any user interaction for some time.; Fabian Winkler’s PI, a set of small robotic devices, which deconstruct TV broadcasts’ audio signals. The robots interpret the regular audio signal as control code and translate it into abstract rhythmic sounds; Troika’s TV predator, a nasty picture frame jealous of the attention that the TV set gets; Simon Greenwold ’s I Like to Watch / CopVision is a program that watches television and in particular COPS on Fox. The software process tries to make sense of a live video feed.