Flutter

Flutter is a small application whose only purpose is to help you control media playback. You might ask why there should be an application to do that.

Well, it is true that all media players come with a set of playback buttons that you can use at least to start, pause and stop the file being played, and even computer keyboards may have special keys for the same purpose. The difference is that Flutter allows you to do it at a distance. The application integrates with some popular media players by detecting if they are currently running. This way, it can use your web cam to detect gestures, specifically when you hold the palm of your hand in front of the camera for a few seconds. This same gesture allows you to send your media player only two basic orders: pause and resume playback.
The program has practically no user interface. It sits quietly on the System Tray, waiting for you to do the agreed gesture. There is a very simple tutorial that is displayed the first time you use it and you can review whenever you need to.
I admit the idea behind this application is rather futuristic. I guess it will not be long before we can start using gestures to tell our computers to do much more than pausing or resuming playback. However, when I tested the application, it did not always identify the gesture successfully, and made me foolishly wave at my computer waiting for the program to react. I guess that sometimes my gestures were probably out of my webcam’s visual field. So, it would be easier if there were just a small window where we could see what our web cameras are actually “seeing”.