Google I/O: Google TV is Adding Support for Pointer Remotes

Google announced at its I/O developer conference yesterday that its Google TV smart TV platform is adding support for pointing remotes, which will unlock new ways to interact with the UI. The company is now encouraging developers to optimize their apps for pointing interactions.

“Pointer remotes bring motion-controlled input to the big screen, unlocking faster user navigation across the Google TV Home page and within content-heavy apps,” Google explained yesterday. Various smart TVs on the market already offer pointer remotes, which aren’t always precises, but app developers will be able to offer larger hover targets for elements in their TV apps.

The addition of pointer support on Google TV also opens the door to new hardware with better remotes. Google said yesterday that there are now over 300 million monthly active devices running either Android TV or Google TV, and the latter has been embraced by Sony, Philips, Hisense, and TCL, to name a few. Google offers its own Google TV streamer with a pretty basic remote, but a company like Walmart has also released a much cheaper Google TV streaming box under its “onn” brand.

Google also said yesterday that it continues to improve the Gemini for Google TV experience that’s coming soon to more markets outside of the US. The AI-powered experience now offers a more personalized discovery engine for streaming partners, and it recently gained AI-powered photo editing and video creation features.