🎯 Background & Motivation

While smart TVs feature the largest and most captivating screen in the living room, most educational TV applications remain passive video players with clunky mobile-port interfaces.

Key pain points:

  1. Poor Remote Control UX: Mobile apps ported to TV have awkward navigation and sluggish focus indicators.
  2. Lack of Conversational Interaction: Children cannot spontaneously ask questions about science or literature videos.
  3. Complex TV Text Input: Entering long AI API keys using a TV remote is tedious and error-prone.

KiddiVision was designed specifically for living-room education: Native TV focus interactions, instant QR code smartphone configuration, real-time streaming voice tutoring, and anti-hotlink video parsing.

🚀 System Features & Architecture

  • 📺 Kotlin + Jetpack Compose for TV Client:

    • D-Pad focus optimization with smooth visual highlights and recommended follow-up questions.
    • Pinyin RubyText: Displays pronunciation guides above Chinese characters to help young children read independently.
    • Media3 ExoPlayer: Direct video stream playback with custom Referer header injection for educational video platforms.
    • Dual-Mode Remote Interaction: Hold [OK] to speak and converse with AI characters in real-time.

  • 🚀 Go High-Performance LAN Server (server/):

    • Single binary deployment with zero Python virtual environment overhead.
    • 📱 Instant Smartphone QR Configuration: TV displays a dynamic QR code; parents scan with their smartphone to configure API keys (DeepSeek / Qwen / OpenAI) with instant live hot-reloading.
    • 🎙️ Edge-TTS Real-Time Streaming: Low-latency chunked audio synthesis over WebSockets using child-friendly neural voices.
    • 📚 Structured Knowledge Graph: Curated science and literature modules with seamless LLM augmentation.

🖼️ Showcase & Topology

KiddiVision Banner

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[ Parent's Smartphone ]
       │ Scans QR Code (HTTP 8080)
       ▼
[ Go Backend (server/) ] ◄──────────► [ AI LLM APIs (DeepSeek / Qwen / OpenAI) ]
       │                                     │
       ├─► [ Edge-TTS Streaming Voice ]      │
       │                                     │
       ▼ (WebSocket Real-Time Stream)        ▼
[ Android TV Client (Kotlin + Compose for TV) ]
       ├── Media3 ExoPlayer (Video Stream)
       ├── RubyText (Pinyin Typography)
       └── Remote Control Focus & Audio Pipeline

🛠️ Engineering Challenges & Highlights

  1. Audio Focus & Remote Lifecycle: When the child presses the remote to ask a question, the video background audio fades out automatically and restores seamlessly after speech interaction completes.
  2. Lightweight Pinyin Layout Component: Custom Jetpack Compose layout ensuring crisp font rendering without Canvas redraw penalties.
  3. Seamless Zero-Config LAN Pairing: Built-in mDNS discovery enables zero-friction phone-to-TV hot synchronization.

📈 Implementation Status

  • Go high-performance server & WebSocket streaming channel
  • Smartphone dynamic QR code pairing and configuration dashboard
  • Edge-TTS real-time audio chunk streaming
  • Jetpack Compose for TV interface & RubyText component
  • Media3 ExoPlayer video pipeline integration

🔗 Links

  • Project Type: Proprietary Smart TV System (Private Deployment)
  • Platform: Android TV 12+ / Sony TV