This seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The front page says, "Remember all those times you had to pause your music but had to find the right window?"
No. Every fucking keyboard on the planet has a pause button on it. Who goes searching for a window to click a button to pause music?
Seriously. The bash-everything mentality is bad - for the Hacker News community, but also for the startup community as a whole. No one is going to create anything new if they're afraid to try.
Beyond that, I don't come to this site to read people insult everyone else. Can you imagine going to a developer meetup where everyone just walks around and criticizes everyone else? But somehow people think that sort of thing is okay online.
As far as I'm concerned, people like this represent the worst form of hackers, and should not be welcome on this site.
Anyway, working on software that takes abstract input to a camera as an interface is awesome, no matter what particular bits of functionality they start off with.
Thanks for being a good sport. The HN crowd can be quite rough. Don't take it personally. I'd take feedback from non-technical users more seriously as they don't have a tendency toward know-it-all-ism and contrarianism like the HN crowd does (myself included I suppose).
To refute the parent, the problem exists. I have a keyword sans playback buttons. I've often wanted a quick way to pause music. Even on my Mac where there are playback buttons, sometimes ill be listening to Spotify, try to pause the song using the keyboard, then iTunes tries to open instead. I'm not sure if your app addresses that problem but it'd be cool if it did.
Maybe I'm just doing it wrong but each time I hit the "I'M READY" button on the intro screen the app crashes (and goes away from my task bar on the top right)... Early 2011 MBP, 10.8.2
Edit: looks to be unrelated to hitting the button, it's just crashing on start-up.
Edit numero dos, ran it from the command line, got this:
kasra-mbp:MacOS kasrarahjerdi$ ./Flutter
sem_open: Operation not permitted
Bus error: 10
kasra-mbp:MacOS kasrarahjerdi$
Do you have a 3ivx or Parian on your machine? Sometimes that does crash our app. If you do then, please upgrade 3ivx to latest version and it fixes the problem.
Really cool app, thanks! I've been using it the whole day yesterday and performance was really good (did get few false positives though..). I was pleasantly surprised when it recognised next song gestures in really dark conditions, hand was mainly lit up just from the macbook screen itself.
It would be really cool to have a gesture for answering a Skype call (maybe even making a call, to pop up online contact list). Telephone hand gesture should do the trick.
Keep up the good work! I can see this going beyond the music control.
I remember commenting the story when the first release came out (IIRC it was just play/pause). I'm thrilled to see that this is still going, as there have been plenty of times I've ended up scrambling around for my Mac remote in the dark.
I tried it with VLC, the play/pause diagram showed up, but nothing happened. Does it only work with iTunes and Spotify?
Edit: I love the design of your site. Very comic book/Roy Lichtenstein-ish. One critique is the hand. Everything else has perspective or shading, the hand is flat and it should be a big part of page and be more noticeable, since it is a motion controlled app.
It should work with latest version of VLC - some old versions do not have script bridge support so we cannot support it. Are you having issues with Next & Previous on the latest version of VLC?
30 minutes later I noticed my fan went into overdrive. Opened up Activity Monitor and noticed this: http://cl.ly/image/0Q3g3Q2b0V1j
It uses a minimum of 70% CPU after several minutes of usage. Needs to be fixed. Closing and re-opening the application solves it for 5-10 mins, then back to the same.
I can't stand downloading things through the App Store. The "do you want to open in" popup where I know I need to wait for a program to load, usually input credentials, and press download again. As I suspect this isn't a very big file, I'd really at least like the option to download straight from the site.
It's a feature added on top of other apps, there's nothing stopping any of those apps from adding this feature and making Flutter a moot point...why not charge for the app now so you can profit before any of the apps you're piggy backing off of pivot and make Flutter irrelevant?
While you have a valid point, Flutter has some pretty deep and well-trained computer vision code that can't be replicated in a month or two. In addition, even if one app (say iTunes) builds this functionality, users would still want gestures for other apps, which is why a separate gesture-recognition-focused product makes sense. I can see Flutter's core tech being useful (e.g., as an API) for a wide variety of uses beyond video consumption.
I'm curious to know what your business model is. Is the market for a utility, even on both platforms, really large enough to interest YC, or are you planning to fry bigger fish?
Flutter is something similar to the gesture pendant used on the Aware Home project at Georgia Tech [1]. The gesture pendant was engineered for those that lacked vision & mobility. One could use the gesture pendant to open blinds, turn on/off the tv, answer the phone, etc. If you're partially blind, it's probably hard to locate the tv remote to turn on the tv, but when you're wearing the pendant, you can do it anywhere. If you're elderly, it may be difficult to open the blinds. The pendant was interesting, but requires special hardware. Flutter can run on anyone's computer via the webcam.
Thx for your kind feedback. Pls make sure your hand is 1-6 feet away and it should work. Even our tests it works fairly well in diff lighting but I am sure you guys will let us know.
On avg it uses about 5% of CPU - 20-30%% when doing gestures and 2-3% when not.
With all due respect, the cool hack now has 4.5M+ gestures used to Play/Pause songs and 100s of thousands of users... so perhaps we may be on right track.
Thanks for appreciate the hard work of fellow developers!
I'm sorry if my post sounded 'offensive'. I just don't think that in five years we're going to control our computers using webcams. They are just not made for that.
I'm still getting 20%, on 2012 Air. Maybe you should try it on a cheaper machine.
Who know what will be there in 5 years? We just want solve for hardware that is already ubiquitous. If better cameras become widespread then we will switch to that hardware.
Yes, doing this on webcam is incredibly difficult but if we can do it then it can really improve HCI. We just thought its worth trying.
Don't get passive aggressive with the haters. Doesn't make you look good..
FWIW, early adopter here and I love the app. The only thing that makes me turn it off occasionally is the false positives from when I'm just touching my face.
Thx Joe - Volume gestures in the works. Once we make it even more efficient we will use full resolution in web cameras and make it work from 12 feet away! Thx again!
yes, we agree. That's Apple Hard-Wired. We don't think it can be turned-off. Let us know if someone has found a hack to turn it off while camera is on.
I know this is supposed to be a gimmicky product but it actually works just well enough (still less practical than the play/pause button on the keyboard) that the novelty factor makes this fun enough that I'm constantly using it over the physical buttons.
I can't see this beating a keyboard for stuff like browsing the internet but it'd be great for controlling music, or maybe air-drumming.
No. Every fucking keyboard on the planet has a pause button on it. Who goes searching for a window to click a button to pause music?