PredictGaze pauses the TV when you get up to grab a beer

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

Follow @Theta1138 More from Dan Seitz >

You’re watching TV, and you decide you’d like another beer. This will necessitate two things: getting up and pausing the TV. The first is generally easily accomplished, while the second may require a lot of digging around and fumbling for the remote.

Unless you’ve got PredictGaze, a technology that just pauses the TV when you leave the room.

The technology is one of those headslappingly simple ideas that you wonder why nobody implemented before. This start-up uses cheap crappy webcams, which are generally bad at providing sharp images but also generally really good at detecting the presence of people. The software just scans the image; when it finds no people, it automatically pauses the TV.

Here’s a video of the technology in action:

There is a catch: To get farther range on the device, you will need a higher-resolution camera. The good news is that you can do this with an iPad camera, and those are not only dirt cheap but can easily be built into your TV.

In short, expect high-end TVs, in fairly short order, to pause whatever you’re watching soon… no remote necessary.

PredictGaze [Official Site]