Pittsburgh ? It’s the one remote control you wouldn’t want to lose. That’s because it’s the ONLY remote you’d have.

Researchers are hard at work trying to create an all-in-one controller that would choreograph not just home entertainment systems but also intelligent appliances all around the house: microwave ovens, clothes dryers, air conditioners, you name it.

“You want to turn on the room and not the devices,” said Peter Lucas, founder and chief executive of Maya Designs Inc., which in concert with Carnegie Mellon University researchers has created a prototype based on a Compaq iPAQ.

The prototype handheld has so far been used to control two lamps, a fan and a stereo with a five-CD changer.

Anyone who regularly juggles multiple remotes the Consumer Electronics Assn. estimates the average U.S. household has at least four can understand why the industry considers a universal remote something of a Holy Grail.

But considerable work, and the thorny business of obtaining industry cooperation on a standard, lies ahead before consumers can even think of shelving all but one of their various remotes.

The current crop of remotes talk to electronics or other appliances via a series of infrared pulses. Each function, like volume and power, has a different set of pulses. What’s more, no two appliances respond to the same pulses.

Anyone who has ever toyed with the current crop of multi-machine remotes knows how confusing it can be to program them to direct a typical den’s worth of home electronics.

“We have managed to take the worst of the PC industry and transplant it into home electronics,” said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research, a New York-based new media consulting firm. “There is a reason they call it programming a remote control. Consumers give up.”

And so the next generation of remotes seeks to break away from the traditional design and depend more on intelligence being programmed into the appliances with which they interact.