Flutter (YC W12) Gesture App featured as one of the Best Apps of 2012 by Apple
ycombinator.posterous.com
ycombinator.posterous.com
Basically, with my program (http://www.mute.fm), your music will get paused/muted automatically whenever a video plays and will be restored afterward by monitoring the volumes of different processes.
This doesn't support the use case of needing to pause your music when you have a real life phone call, need to leave your desk, or have people gathered around your computer, though.
But its more interesting to look at these "novelty" interaction patterns as stepping stones and building blocks to future interfaces. Most new things look novel and useless until someone cherry-picks the bits and pieces and makes something really revolutionary with them.
tl;dr More weird things, please!
I'll attempt to make a prediction: gesture based and other natural computer interactions will become common-place by 2020, primarily in living room and personal robotics applications.
And right now, it is at the stage slightly ahead of the time when touch screens were first introduced: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/...
Think of it as a technology demo that's cool and can be used by anyone to demonstrate the research they're doing (though most people just think of it as a cool app, they don't know the backstory).
I'm almost certain they have a bigger picture for the long term.
That said, this is the first niche use case that we wanted to solve. Actually, we have significant number of daily & weekly active users who use this product everyday. We've tracked (through analytics) 25M gestures already. We have 5 star rating on mac app store, users in 150+ countries worldwide and large number of users (more than many mobile apps)!
We will be releasing volume gestures very soon to complete basic remote gestures for the app. We are also working mute, like, and scrolling gestures.
Flutter is product driven research company. Meaning that our mission is to take Computer Vision research and use engineering to turn this into real usable apps.
Use cases that real users have send us emails about:
Dance Teacher - playing/pausing and replaying song from distance while practicing.
Surgeon - Listening to music while doing a medical surgery.
Architects - Listening to music from distance while building your models.
Students - listening to music while reading from bed or while laying down.
Father - using Flutter to control music while rocking his baby.
Usability is in freeing you from your computer!
App is free because it is incomplete (i.e. lacks few gestures). We will start charging for it once we add all the gestures!