
Show HN: Zesture – Control Mac/Windows Apps Using Hand Gestures - radhakrsna
https://zesture.app/
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radhakrsna
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_swm09Xmtg&feature=emb_title)

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!

~~~
dgellow
> 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.

~~~
mbzi
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!

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

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jarym
This is very neat looking and at some point I may give this a go to control
Spotify.

One concern I have though is with this running the LED light on camera is
always going to be active (which is fine) but I then won't know if some other
(malicious) app is accessing my camera.

Another thing to keep in mind is I am sure some form of this eventually makes
it into MacOS. No way Apple acquired all those gesture patents without having
some kind of plan for them.

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de6u99er
I had once a summer intern work on this. I wanted to use it in our chemical
and biological labs because scientists had to constantly take off their gloves
to use the computers next to e.g. HPLC's.

Funny that people can create a company around such ideas.

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beeman
This looks pretty neat! I'm definitely going to give it a try!

Also, I really appreciate the price, with the $9,99 one time purchase it seems
like it's afforable to a lot of people, especially if they'd use it
professionally.

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reiichiroh
I bought the old Magic Leap motion control sensor device a couple of years ago
and this is an all software replacement.

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villgax
Some college kid could get this done in a day with TF.js/BlazePalm. It's like
the Flutter app which google bought for the domain & instead of releasing it
or doing anything with it they decided to just use the name for their attempt
at another mobile app development framework...

~~~
timwis
Mate, this is a Show HN post. This comment is pretty mean..

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ronakjain90
Hi there -

Looks very neat, would give it a try.

