Indeed this is a genius way to cut costs AND reduce exposed circuitry or ports which is very important for something that seemingly can be removed on a whim and fast/easily put back. Moreover, depending on the integration of the mirrors/dummy switches for the IR you could even incorporate analog controls into this based on %-radiation or %-distribution of the light cone of the sensor. The proximity would make this have identical latency to just copper wire as well, if not better since the only negotiation is "the speed of light" and a processing unit which is no different from a standard board processing unit to understand a directional input, you've just replaced pure electronic signals with optoelectronics.
Also next to no battery drain on the control platform.
I'd hide the shit out of this until my patents were secured and my product was ready to go, haha. You can save a lot of money and energy expenditure with this move, allowing you to cut costs and invest your total power draw elsewhere.