Red Box’s user interface
April 13, 2009Late last month, Epson Philippines treated Cyberpress to a night at Red Box. Thanks to Hideto Nakamura, President; Eduardo “Ed” Bonoan, Senior General Manager; Donna Ferro, General Manager; and the rest of the Epson Philippines staff for a rocking good time. Ed and I chatted a while, observing that the user interface of the videoke software was by-the-numbers — i.e., to get to the Artists menu, you’d press a number (6?) on the remote control, then ‘1′ for those artists whose names begin with the letter ‘A’, ‘2′ for ‘B’ (or something like that — I’m working off my failing memory here). How primitive, we agreed, likening it to the old green-screen terminals — never mind that the screen was colored. We joked that the interface was so 20th century, and it needed a 21st century refresh. Like maybe a touch screen. To be fair, the song title search is a little more “modern”: press “23″ to get song titles starting ‘W’, but instead of pressing enter, keep spelling out a part of the song title; “15″ for ‘O’, then “14″ for ‘N’. At that point, you can press the Enter button to get songs starting with “WON”. As an aside, I was looking for The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” but their publisher has refused to license their songs to videoke bars. Oh well…
A few weeks later, I find instructions — or maybe more precisely, a build log — for a DIY multi-touch surface-like computer. The authors say it took them about two weeks, some of which was spent in the error part of trial-and-error.
Now here’s a challenge — anyone care to drive their Magic Sings with one of these puppies?
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