

Flutter (YC W12) Gesture App featured as one of the Best Apps of 2012 by Apple - vgulshan
http://ycombinator.posterous.com/flutter-yc-w12-is-featured-as-one-of-the-best

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SeanA208
I enjoy the idea of Flutter and the technology it demonstrates is quite
impressive. I will say, however, it just doesn't seem like something that I
could actually use on a day-to-day basis as it's faster and better on the
battery to just press the play/pause or next/previous buttons on the keyboard
(provided you have them). In fact, when I downloaded it, the only times I
turned it on were to show my friends for novelty's sake.

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runeb
I agree this seems to fall in the category of "neat but seemingly useless"
since it actually takes more power and effort to do a simple task.

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!

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dchichkov
Yep. I very much agree.

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/...](http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-
content/images/retroscan/hp150_large.jpg)

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jpb0104
Webcam on all the time concerning to you too? Privacy info:
<https://flutterapp.com/privacy/>

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mehuln
Our app works locally on your pc/mac so no webcam images ever leave your
computer.

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jpb0104
Cool. I was curious and figured others would be as well. I like the idea.
Effect on battery life? App is free, what's the model?

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onedev
It's basically a front for all the cool research they're doing behind the
scenes in Computer Vision (the company consists of 3 PhDs). The app itself
isn't necessarily to make money.

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.

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mehuln
We indeed have a bigger vision.

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!

