RedEye connects to your home Wi-Fi network, allowing anyone in your house with an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to control your home theater. RedEye automatically synchronizes information across all your devices, so you can pick up right where the last person left off. You can even take control when you are away from home using a VPN or port forwarding.
The RedEye system can control virtually all devices that receive infrared control signals — in other words, TVs, cable boxes, stereos, DVD players, VCRs, and much more. It consists of two pieces: an iPhone application, and a hardware device. The iPhone application is a free download from iTunes, and works with all iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad models running iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
Personal.
Each person in your house can use her own iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad as a controller, and more than one controller can interact with your gear simultaneously.
Simple.
One touch launches any activity – watch TV, listen to music, play a video. And custom screen layouts for each activity mean you never have to hunt for the right button.
Smart.
Multi-touch and motion gestures, free software updates, backup to a PC, even whole house control for a fraction of the price of other professional systems.
How Does It Work?
Central Storage
After you install the RedEye app, your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad can communicate with the RedEye dock over Wi-Fi. When you configure the system to reflect your home theater setup, your configuration is stored on the RedEye device. Then if you connect with a different phone your stored configuration automatically syncs to the new controller. In fact, when you switch activities using one controller you can see the change reflected on other controllers. You can even back up your configuration to a PC through RedEye’s built-in homepage.
Wirelessly, on Your Network
Even though our computers and cell phones are on the Internet, most of our other electronics continue to work using older technology such as infrared remote controls. While infrared is reliable and affordable, it has limitations — chief among them a relatively limited range and the inability to penetrate opaque objects like walls. RedEye uses infrared to communicate with your gear, but it communicates with your phone using Wi-Fi. In other words, RedEye maintains a line of sight to your equpiment so that you don’t have to. It also means that RedEye is essentially a “bridge” that can put your home theater online. Yes, you guessed it — with RedEye you can even control your home theater when you are away from home.
Standard Internet Technology
RedEye is actually a small Linux server. It uses standard Internet technologies like TCP and HTTP, and sends around information in XML documents. Why do you care? Because it means that RedEye isn’t just a remote control platform for your iPhone. In theory, any Internet-connected device can communicate with RedEye. We will soon be releasing a software update that enables you to control RedEye from any PC with a basic web browser. And going forward we plan to develop software specific to other devices including the iPad and Android phones.
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