Comment by radhakrsna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radhakrsna | Hacker News Reader

Hey!

Touch-less technology is the future (especially after the Covid-19 pandemic).

So, I made Zesture, a Mac/Windows app that uses your laptop's camera to give you touch-free control over your media, entertainment and presentation applications (without any extra hardware).

You can watch a demo video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_swm09Xmtg&feature=emb_titl...

Supported Apps and Websites:

- Music: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify (Web Player), YouTube Music, Amazon Music (Web Player) and Deezer.

- Video: VLC Media Player, YouTube and Netflix.

- Presentation: Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote.

️Supported Actions: Play/Pause, Next/Previous Track, Enter/Exit Full-screen, Forward/Rewind, Mute/Unmute, Volume Up/Down.

Privacy: Using your webcam is totally secure. Gesture recognition is done locally on your computer and hence we don't record, save or send any images or videos at all. Your camera is turned off automatically after a certain period of inactivity (configurable via the app).

We’d love to get your feedback and look forward to answering any questions!

> Touch-less technology is the future

What makes you think that's the case? What's the reasoning to start to use touch-less technologies, and why would they be the future? IMHO the lack of physical feedback makes it a non-starter though that's just my personal preference.

Edit: I forgot to add that it looks like a great product, and the landing page is quite good! I just don't see what are the arguments in favor of touch-less techs.

Hi, thank you for appreciating our product and landing page.

There are quite a few articles which are saying that touchless tech will witness growth much faster than earlier due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Some links: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/92823-covid-19-and... https://builtin.com/design-ux/future-touchless

Some use cases I have personally worked on:

To allow surgeons to interact with my software within an operating room without the need for an assistant (to remain sterile).

Interactive retail displays outside the store. Users can interact with augmented reality displays and visualize themselves wearing the store products and/or to play a game to win prizes, etc.

Problems encountered:

Hardware adequate for long experiences e.g. Microsoft Life camera freezes after a few hours. Finding a device which can run 24/7 is a problem. Then once you found a good device you need to understand the risk of it being pulled from the market e.g. Primesense, Kinect, Intel RealSense (pulled and replaced by a new product and SDK, etc).

If a depth camera is used the type of bulbs to sunlight can interfere with tracking accuracy. If RGB is solely used then I am curious to see how well it works with various skin-tone in different lighting conditions and complicated backgrounds.

The "heavy arm/hand" problem. Try lifting your hand for 5 minutes and not putting it down. Users can be fatigued very quickly with a gesture based UX. Most products are not designed for this interaction.

In terms of Zesture:

The website is clean, to the point, great starting point. However I would like to:

- See an Enterprise license for long term support - Know how well it benchmarks against other SDKs/hardware solutions which achieve the same effect - Patents, does this infringe on other proprietary innovations? (do you have patent troll insurance?) - Guidelines for the best experience, e.g. distance from the camera if you were to use gestures to control a presentation - Roadmap, where are you going next?(FYI I am looking for a new way of hand based gestures which can be deployed via WebRTC and WebAssembly for interactive web based experiences :) )

Keep up the good work, looks promising!

Thanks, that's a really good comment, I appreciate the details :)

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