FluidTunes: The "wave" of the future?

I tried it out and while it's not perfect (flicking through your library just did NOT register for me) it's certainly a good sign of things to come. Give this another year of polish and I know I'd be down for controlling my music Minority Report-style. Add in some features like browse by Artist, Album, etc. instead of every song. Still I'm glad to see my iSight getting used more. Delicious Library still reigns supreme!

This is real fun!
However I wonder how it interact with iTunes. There is indeed no way to ask iTunes to show me the currently playing song anymore after using it, which is something I had never seen before.

It's "interesting" how often you were able to use the word "interesting" this short post. Come on, TUAW, you can write better than this!

Okay, this is kinda cool. Kind of useless, but neat nonetheless.

I got it to work just fine, waving through my collection. Problem was when I got up from my desk to get my wife to show it to her it interpreted my body going across the field of view and started playing the selected song!

Had to desperately wave my hand on the stop button just out of the shot to get it to stop. ;)

I decided to give this a try in class today and I felt like a total idiot. I finally got use to it and all I really had to do was wiggle my thumb and it actually registered quite well. It really needs some work though, every time someone walks behind me the song changes.

It's a great proof of concept, and it would be neat to show off by putting it in a room at a party and using it to control music, but for every day use, it's not very good. The biggest problem to me is that wiggling my fingers to scroll through all my music one song at a time is pretty useless. If it interacted with what I have selected in iTunes so that I could pick a playlist and use FluidTunes to advance through songs in the playlist, it could be great, though.

Also, while using the forward, backward and play buttons worked fine, trying to "flick" through album art hardly ever worked for me in a moderately well lit room. I could sit there and wave at it for a long time before it registered a flick, and even when it did, it was just as likely to register me moving my hand in the other direction and flick back the other way. Also, I couldn't ever figure out how far it was going to flick, so I'd wind up jumping randomly through my music collection somewhere between 5 and 50 songs at a time.

All in all, I'd certainly like to see them continue to work on this and get it better integrated into iTunes.

For some reason it shows all of my tracks as duplicate images of their source album. I don't like wiggling my finger for 15 minutes to simply play a track that I could select in seconds wiht my mouse. Neat idea. Maybe if it were implemented into itunes in a different way it might be handy. Say, you could just use it to switch tracks in shuffle mode. But...

nevermind...

Fun tech demo.

Deleted.

I've long thought that something like this is the ultimate logical evolution of multitouch. Most Apple computers already have iSight built-in. In fact I'd be surprised if Apple weren't already working on this.

As with the iPhone itself, the concept is the easy part. Getting it to work reliably and intuitively will probably take an immense amount of work, and Apple is better positioned to actually pull it off in a satisfying and marketable way than a 3rd party company.

Very neat idea. So, so, so, sooo not ready for primetime. But kudos for giving it a shot.

Downloaded. Tried. Deleted.