ControlAir Uses Gestures To Control Macs

A new app for Mac is out now, known as ControlAir, which lets your Mac detect your face and fingers in order to control the device. Gestures with specific hand and face positioning can be used to control music apps as well as change the overall volume of music.

Whilst the feature does look a little bit silly in press shots, ControlAir is very intuitive, requiring calibration with your face and your sitting position before working, and then giving the user access to some very relevant gestures to perform music actions whilst working on other programs.

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Once a music app, including iTunes, Spotify, VLC, Quicktime Player, VOX and Rdio, is playing a song, ControlAir lets you perform gestures to pause, change tracks, mute and or change the volume up or down. Raising a finger brings up a control menu, and then moving the finger left or right selects a button.

Amazingly ControlAir isn’t the kind of that requires the user to be sitting glued to the monitor – reportedly the app has a range of close on 3 metres, allowing a standing user to fiddle with audio settings whilst a little way across the room. Once calibrated, you can calmly change the volume or song mid conversation at your dinner party, of Mac Genius gathering.

One of the coolest features of ControlAir is the ability to shush songs with a finger to the lips gesture. Raising your finger to your mouth hushes the song to mute mode, and then performing the same shushing action a second time brings the song back. Now you don’t have to delete those old Spice Girls tracks you secretly like, because if you’re quick enough you have the ability to shut up your Mac when the song comes on.

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ControlAir is yet another gesture based piece of software from eyeSight, who have been working in the field of gesture control for quite some time. The company has already been busy tinkering with software to transform simple cameras into motion control input sensors, with great success, as you can see.

The ControlAir app is now available from the Mac App Store at the link below, so if you’re interested you can download the app for absolutely free. Check it out now, you’ve got nothing to lose except your dignity if you can’t quite get it to work and get stuck waving a finger frantically at your Mac.

Source: ControlAir on the Apple Store

Via: Engadget