Gestures are where it is at these days, with the Kinect add-on for Xbox 360 and the motion controls of the Wii allowing for direct interaction with games and other software. Even mobile devices such as Android and iOS phones and tablets are making more and more use of gestures rather than menus and buttons. Touch screen displays are available for Mac and PC that make this possible in Windows and OS X, but Flutter enables you to use your web cam to interact using gestures.
As you can tell from the version number (currently 0.1.185), this is a very early version of the software and thins are a little limited at the moment – but that’s not to say that it is not still worth taking a look at. At the moment Flutter can be used to control your media player, enabling you to use basic hand gestures to start and pause music or video playback.
Flutter
Currently this is the only supported gesture – a simple holding of the hand in front of your web cam is used to both pause and resume playback – but there are plans to add more. It can be used with Spotify, Windows Media Player, iTunes. QuickTIme and VLC, and in future releases support will be added for YouTube, Netflix, Pandora and Hulu. The great thing about the app, despite its obvious limitations, is the fact that the program you are controlling does not have to be in the foreground.
Next time you receive a phone call while you are working and listening to music, there’s no need to bring to media player in front of every other running app before hunting for the pause button. Instead you can just hold you open palm in front of your web cam and playback will pause until you repeat the motion. Once gestures for track skipping and volume control are added this will be a great app, but for the time being it is still a curiosity that’s worth investigating.
You can find out more and download a free copy of the app by paying a visit to the Flutter page.
This article originally appeared at softwarecrew.co.uk
