Filed under: Software, Cool tools, iTunes
FluidTunes: The "wave" of the future?
FluidTunes works by using iSight to track your hand gestures as you navigate through the program. You make a side to side sweep to browse through your iTunes library in Cover Flow mode. Then, you wave at the play and pause buttons to start and stop the music.
It's an interesting concept, but the execution is rather sloppy. You need to be in a fairly well-lit room for iSight to register the gestures correctly. My first attempt at using FluidTunes was in the kitchen in full natural daylight, and it worked fairly well. It was easy to wave from side to side to browse my music. However, I kept accidentally activating the play and stop buttons. When I waved at the play and stop buttons, they didn't work. Pointing at the buttons worked better, but as I dropped my hand away, it would either activate another button or I'd accidentally scroll to another song. Using the program in poor light is even worse. My second test area was in the living room with the lights dimmed. The program wouldn't stop scrolling through my library, and nothing would activate the play and pause buttons.
FluidTunes is an interesting concept that I think has a lot of potential, but needs a bit of work. It's something that currently needs a lot of light to operate, so it wouldn't be ideal for use in situations such as controlling your music from bed before falling asleep. If Majic Jungle can fine tune the controls for use in various lighting situations, it could open up a lot of possibilities for this sort of program.
FluidTunes is a free download and runs on a Universal Binary. It requires OS X 10.4.11 or higher.
Many thanks to everyone who sent this in!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Vernal said 1:23PM on 12-09-2008
Heh, this is fun, but it seems WAY more interested in my head than my hands. Now my neck hurts.
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Lee Webb said 1:26PM on 12-09-2008
What a pile of crap that is.
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Joshua said 6:42PM on 12-09-2008
I am curious to see if apple buys them out like they did coverflow.
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Philster said 1:39PM on 12-09-2008
Downloaded. Tried. Deleted.
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Aloysius Snuffleupagus said 1:50PM on 12-09-2008
Very neat idea. So, so, so, sooo not ready for primetime. But kudos for giving it a shot.
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Tom said 1:54PM on 12-09-2008
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.
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directeco said 2:32PM on 12-09-2008
They are.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/12/04/apple_proposes_infrared_matrix_to_aid_larger_multi_touch_designs.html
Binja said 2:00PM on 12-09-2008
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.
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brotkel said 2:05PM on 12-09-2008
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.
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inspirationondemand said 2:40PM on 12-09-2008
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.
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walkerjs said 4:52PM on 12-09-2008
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. ;)
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Dugnsand said 5:56PM on 12-09-2008
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!
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Cowicide said 9:19PM on 12-09-2008
Kudos to the dev for doing this and pushing gestures forward on Macs with this proof of concept.
This is how it would be much better implemented:
http://gizmodo.com/5080514/diy-hand-gesture-multi+touch-using-a-webcam-and-magic
This way it would have a lot less false positives, etc. Doing the "wii approach" is cool, but once you see the video above you'll understand why another way makes more sense.
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hamsterdecombat said 3:24AM on 12-10-2008
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.
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nickux said 12:27PM on 12-10-2008
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!
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