Hands-on with Google’s latest acquisition: Flutter, a webcam gesture app

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Google buys a flawless hand gesture solution for... something. 

by Ron Amadeo

A company called Flutter has just announced that they've been purchased by Google. Flutter is a simple Windows and Mac OSX app that lets you control popular media players through a webcam. Just put your hand up to stop the media playback, point your thumb right for "next" and left for "previous." It seems like not many people had heard of Flutter (yours truly included) until Google took the company under its wing, but luckily the app is still available for download, so we snagged it and gave it a quick test.

The app works fantastically well and hand gesture detection is near-instant. It works with iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, VLC, Keynote, Winamp, Windows Media Player, and, with a Chrome extension, Youtube, Netflix, Pandora, and Grooveshark. Considering the length of that compatibility list, we suspect it's converting your hand signals into the standard media controls that adorn many keyboards. The homepage of the Flutter website has been replaced with the buyout message, but the original page is still up at https://flutterapp.com/home/. 

Navneet Dalal, Flutter's CEO wrote to its users today:

When we started three years ago, our dream to build a ubiquitous and power-efficient gesture recognition technology was considered by many as just "a dream", not a real possibility. Since then, we have strived to build the best machine vision algorithms and a delightful user experience.

Even after we launched our first app, we didn’t stop our research; your enthusiasm and support pushed us to continue to do better. We're inspired everyday when we hear, for example, that Flutter makes you feel like a superhero—because any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic, right?

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google’s passion for 10x thinking, and we’re excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to all of our users; your feedback and evangelism inspire us every day. Flutter users will be able to continue to use the app, and stay tuned for future updates.

The next question is what will Google do with a webcam gesture app? The most obvious choice is that it will integrate the functionality into Chromebooks, or Chrome itself. Flutter's hand gesture recognition could be a big differentiator and would keep the company a step ahead of the OEMs that are working to integrate Leap Motion's more frustrating hand gesture technology. With zero extra hardware required, it's much cheaper than Leap technology, too.

Using Flutter's capabilities in Android could be another path for Google. Currently, Samsung has a similar feature in its smartphones called "Air Gesture," which lets you accept calls, switch music tracks, flip through pictures, and turn the screen on, all through gestures performed in front of the front-facing camera.

If you're interested, you can try the latest edition to the Google Hivemind for yourself. The download is still up on Flutter's Web page.

Courtesy: arstechnica

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