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Control media using hand gestures with Flutter
Whether you're using a laptop as your media center or you just need to quickly turn off your music to take a call, Flutter is a great app that lets you use hand gestures for simple media control.
Smartphones and tablets are spoiling us for our other devices. It's so easy to swipe, tap, and gesture our way through our mobile lives that we sometimes get frustrated with more traditional tech like laptops. Flutter aims to help solve one small problem in a fun way -- playing and pausing music quickly -- and it works great. Here's how to use it:
- Install Flutter here for Windows 7 and here for Mac.
- Run iTunes, Spotify, Winamp, or Windows Media Player. Your Webcam control panel should also start up, but you can ignore it.
- Start up your music or video.
- To pause, just hold either hand up in front of your Webcam, between 1 and 6 feet away. You may need to play around with your angle a bit, but you should quickly find your media paused.
- To start up again, just hold your hand back up in front of your Webcam.
That's it, for now. It's almost ludicrously simple, but it's a great way to control your music quickly. This teaser page implies that the brains behind Flutter are adding a skip feature to the app, and I am certainly looking forward to that, and whatever else they cook up. Here are some more pieces on media players:
- How to share your iTunes music library on a home network
- How to add an equalizer to Spotify
- How to set up hot keys for most Windows media players
Thanks to The Red Ferret for the tip!
