Oct 02

Gesture control startup Flutter acquired by Google, could make Gmail Motion a reality

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Gesture control startup Flutter acquired by Google

Another day, another tech startup gets acquired. This time around it’s Google snatching up Y Combinator-hatched Flutter, the developer of a gesture control app for Windows and Mac PCs. There’s no word on what it’s planning for the team and its technology — we’d suggest 2011 April Fool’s joke Gmail Motion, but someone beat them to that — but the company’s current product uses existing webcams to enable gesture control of software like Spotify, VLC or iTunes. According to CEO Navneet Dalal, users will continue to be able to use the app and should “stay tuned for future updates.” Even after Kinect and all of the other gesture control entries we’re not sure if it’s the future, although creating a solution that has decent precision without requiring extra hardware is interesting. The company’s founders told TechCrunch last year that they want Flutter to be the eyes of our computers the way apps like Siri or Google Now are the ears of our device, we’ll see if teaming up with Google pushes that movement forward.

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Via: Hacker News

Source: Flutter

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Aug 13

Insert Coin: the ixi-play robot owl monitors toddlers, helps them learn (video)

Posted in: Today's Chili

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.

Insert Coin the ixiplay robot owl monitors toddlers, helps them learn

Isn’t a baby monitor effectively a waste of technology? With a bit more thought and an operating system, couldn’t it do much more with its components than just scope your infant? That’s the premise behind Y Combinator-backed ixi-play, an Android-powered robot that just launched on the Crowdhoster crowdfunding platform. On top of Android 4.2, a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU, 1GB RAM and a 720p camera, the owlish ‘bot has face, card and object detection, voice recognition, a touch-sensor on the head, eye displays for animations, a tweeter/woofer speaker combo and child-proof “high robustness.” For motion, the team adopted a design used in flight simulators, giving ixi-play “agile and silent” 3-axis translation and rotation moves.

All that tech is in the service of one thing, of course: your precious snowflake. There are currently three apps for ixi-play: a baby monitor, language learning and animal-themed emotion cards. As the video shows (after the break), the latter app lets your toddler flash cards to the bot to make it move or emote via the eye displays, matching the anger or happiness shown on the card. In baby monitor mode, on top of sending a live (encoded) video stream to your tablet, it’ll also play soothing music and sing or talk your toddler to sleep. The device will also include an SDK that includes low-level motion control and vision programming, providing a way for developers to create more apps. As for pricing, you can snap one up starting at $299 for delivery around July 24th, 2014, provided the company meets its $957,000 funding goal (pledges are backed by Crowdtilt). That’s exactly the same price we saw recently for far less amusing-sounding baby monitor, so if you’re interested, hit the source.

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Source: Ixi-Play

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