In an answer to the ongoing debate about whether next generation television will be powered by the internet or existing television infrastructure, Irish design studio Notion have proposed MetaMirror, a vision of living room media that combines broadcasting technologies with the power of metadata, streamed via the internet to smart, handheld devices and superimposed over the existing image. Developments in IPTV, the ubiquity capacitative touch sensitivity, and advancements in smart object recognition are cited as driving technologies.

The context photo above, depicting a very familiar scene of screens upon screens, convinced us that this idea (or a version of it) is not so far fetched at all. Notion has indulged this behavior, creating a television viewing platform that is both broadcast-only and highly interactive, without really sacrificing the properties of either.

Concisely:

The product is a software platform which runs on a secondary device of the users choice, displaying this contextual content over a mirror of the television broadcast. By bringing together live television, real-time contextual information and an intuitive user interface, Meta Mirror is positioned to update television from uni-directional broadcast to two-way interaction.

To illustrate, they've mocked up three tv-watching scenarios: sports, lifestyle programs and music videos, which we've excerpted below.

Sports (pictured top): For sports the main screen is dedicated to the game/match in question. Real time statistics of the game, together with twitter updates and other scores of the viewers choice are all overlayed on the device running MetaMirror. In addition, new forms of online betting / merchandising / purchasing are enabled.

Lifestyle Programming: In lifestyle programming tagged objects, in this case ingredients, become clickable. This in combination with 3rd party supermarket plugins makes putting together shopping baskets simple.

Music Broadcasts: Music broadcasts are enriched by track names, album details and further artist information. Direct links to iTunes, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia and broadcasters music websites allow viewers to delve further into the music on screen. As smart object recognition becomes more commonplace, instruments are tagged automatically.