Panasonic showed off a prototype remote control on Tuesday that's designed for future IPTV services and uses twin trackpads instead of a keypad for user input.

See pictures of Panasonic's IPTV, plus many other cool gadgets from the CEATEC show

Designed by Panasonic's R&D center, the concept remote resembles a gaming controller, with a couple of buttons in the center, flanked by a clickable touchpad on two sides.

When a user touches one of the pads, virtual buttons are displayed on the television, along with a cursor designed to look like a finger. Instead of looking down at the remote when choosing a button, users keep their eyes on the screen to select the input they want.

"That's actually better for you than looking down," Jean-Claude Junqua, managing director of the Panasonic San Jose Laboratory, said at the Ceatec exhibition in Chiba, Japan.

The remote can sense when its being held in a right hand or left hand, and will reconfigure the virtual buttons on the fly to make them suit a right-handed or left-handed person.

Besides being used to change TV channels, the remote can be used with other applications. In a demonstration of one such application, a Panasonic executive used the remote's trackpad to flip through a collection of digital photographs.

The remote can also be used in a horizontal orientation, held by two hands with each controlling one of the trackpads. In this orientation, the Panasonic executive demonstrated how a user could manipulate a photo, rotating it and zooming in to see details.

The flexibility of the concept remote is ideal for IPTV, where many potential applications have yet to be developed, Junqua said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.