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Beo5 remote control
Sensory science behind our new Beo66 remote control
People should not be forced to adapt to technology. Technology should be adapted to them. Consequently, we here at Bang & Olufsen make our products work intuitively by constantly cleaning up functions and getting rid of those that are not truly needed.
High-profile collaboration
One example of this is the new Beo6 remote control. Every detail of the Beo6 has been designed, engineered and researched to perfection, sometimes in conjunction with some very high-profile companies indeed. The introduction of a touch-screen, for instance, came from the results of a joint Bang & Olufsen and NASA research project into sensory deprivation. The NASA study involved 70 subjects, all of whom were required to wear gloves or goggles to imitate the same lack of feeling or sight they would encounter in space. They were then asked to operate simple light switches.
"We measured how the switches felt, sounded and looked to our participants," explains Chief Technologist and Head of Research Søren Bech. In doing so, Bech and his team found out how important these sensations were, and, as it turned out, the results confirmed much of the work they had already done with the Beo6 touch screen.
"Touch screens have one important drawback; they do not give you tactile feedback, so you get a reduced feeling of what you are doing. We had to think of a way of replacing the feeling in your fingers with something else, and to do that we had to understand what it takes to translate what you are doing with your hands to audible or visual feedback," comments Bech.
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"What we came up with," adds Chief Designer David Lewis, "was a glide and press principle, where you run your thumb over the control until the command you want is highlighted on-screen. Only then do you press, the channel changes, and the remote gives you a further visual cue."
Human interaction
The key, it seems, is understanding the way man and machine interact. This sector is run by Head of User Interface, Henrik Hedemark. And once the NASA study was over, Hedemark took Bech's findings and worked his technological alchemy on the finished product.