Google has acquired Flutter, a startup that specialises in gesture recognition technology and offers a desktop app that allows users to navigate their devices through gestures that are recognised via the device's webcam.
The company has put up a landing page confirming the acquisition and has promised that Flutter users will be able to continue to use the app. The note by Navneet Dalal, CEO of the company says:
"When we started three years ago, our dream to build a ubiquitous and power-efficient gesture recognition technology was considered by many as just "a dream", not a real possibility. Since then, we have strived to build the best machine vision algorithms and a delightful user experience.
Even after we launched our first app, we didn't stop our research; your enthusiasm and support pushed us to continue to do better. We're inspired everyday when we hear, for example, that Flutter makes you feel like a superhero -- because any sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic, right?
Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google's passion for 10x thinking, and we're excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey.
We'd like to extend a special thank you to all of our users; your feedback and evangelism inspire us every day. Flutter users will be able to continue to use the app, and stay tuned for future updates."
The value of the deal is not known but according to a
report by TechCrunch, it's pegged to be around $40 million.
The app's Mac App Store listing calls it 'Kinect for OS X' as it uses hand gestures detected via the built-in webcam to play, pause and skip songs and videos in iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, YouTube and other services (via a Chrome extension) and apps. The app had 1 million users in first two weeks of launch, as per the report.
It would be interesting to see whether Google integrates hand gestures in its own products such as Glass, Android and Chromebook or continues to develop and support new apps.