What if you never had to use your mouse again? This dream could become a reality sooner than you think. Google just acquired Flutter, a popular motion detection app that lets you control media on your computer via hand gestures observed by your webcam. The software lets you orchestrate your favorite media players like iTunes, Spotify and Windows Media Player to play things like movies or music with just the flick of a wrist! All you need to do is put your hand up to stop media playback, point your thumb to the right for “next,” or point left to play the “previous” media again.
What Is Flutter?
Flutter is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Chrome to control Web apps like YouTube, Pandora, Grooveshark and Netflix.
Are you looking to master the Web from afar without the modern-day shackles known as a keyboard and mouse?
Flutter’s playful and comic-like Web interface begs users to join “the fight against unnatural user interfaces.”
Navneet Dalal, Flutter CEO, said:
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.”
The Future of Hand Gesture Recognition
So what does this acquisition mean for Google and the future of gesture detection? Beyond potentially eradicating Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, this acquisition could mean our computers and mobile devices will become more natural in their interfaces and almost disappear into the background of our daily lives. We can expect to see Google integrate Flutter’s technology into its core products like Chrome (alleviating the need for the extension), Chromecast, the Android OS and Chromebooks. You could also speculate that this might somehow integrate with Samsung’s existing detection features built into the Galaxy S4: Air View, which allows you to quickly hover over and preview content for email and other media, and Air Gesture, which allows you to control music, browse the Web or answer phone calls.
If you want to look a little farther into the future, perhaps Google will soon consider for acquisition companies like WiSee, which enable motion detection without cameras by intelligently detecting motion through Wi-Fi signals.
Are you excited to one day stop clicking the mouse for good?
via Google Operating System
