Navneet Dalal Makes PCs Read Hand Gestures

Navneet Dalal co-founded Flutter to turn every PC into a device that can be controlled by hand gestures.

Navneet Dalal co-founded Flutter with the goal of turning any PC equipped with a webcam into a device that can be controlled by hand gestures.

Flutter is unique because it requires neither special hardware nor an investment of time training the software. Instead any PC with an ordinary webcam instantly becomes a gesture-recognition device simply by downloading and installing Flutter’s software. Since its release in March 20,000 users have installed it.

“We treat this webcam as the eye of the machine,” says Flutter co-founder Mehul Nariyawala. “And our thought process is that machines and humans should interact the way two humans with eyes should interact.”

A raised open palm is the gesture the Flutter software is currently programmed to recognize as a signal that can be used to pause or play music or videos in iTunes or music in Spotify. Flutter is already adding to the vocabulary with more gestures and more types of video content, including Netflix and YouTube videos. Additional gesture controls in the works include skipping forward or back and turning volume up or down.

The Flutter software is programmed to ignore background movements and the duo are working on improving its algorithm to more reliably distinguish gestures intended to be commands from random movements of the open palm.

Another product that Flutter has in the works is a two-player video game. Players can intercept blue shooting stars that fly across the screen and blow them up with hand gestures. Like its media control software, the game doesn’t need an investment of time to learn a special vocabulary of commands or additional hardware.

Flutter hopes to make its profits by charging for some advanced features and for developers to use its software for new apps. For now the Flutter software — currently in alpha testing — is free to all users who want to download it.

Before co-founding Flutter Dalal was a senior researcher at Like.com, a visual search engine for online shopping. He received his PhD from INRIA Grenoble based on a thesis titled “Finding People in Images and Video Sequences”. Dalal grew up in Chandigarh, India and lived in Grenoble, France before moving to the San Francisco Bay area. He devotes spare time to biking, hiking, travel and skiing.