Zesture

Make the most of this desktop application and its counterpart for your Chrome browser. Zesture is a program that allows you to interact with your screen using hand gestures. The tool is available for your laptop/desktop and can be connected to your Chrome browser by installing the corresponding extension.

Zesture is a program that will connect to your system, detect, and control your laptop/desktop's camera for recognizing your hand gestures. The downloadable executable is pretty large, but its size is justifiable. Although you must allow the app access to your webcam, this is totally safe as the gestures' movements are recorded and interpreted locally and the tool does not save/store/share any piece of data. Moreover, after a certain period of inactivity, the camera stops automatically.

At the moment, Zesture can connect to a limited number of applications, such as Spotify, Apple Music (iTunes), Amazon Music, VLC, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Chrome (only with the extension installed). You can easily set the tool to stop after a given period of time (10/30/60 minutes). After activating it for a certain program, the app sends desktop notifications to let you know when it is ready to be used. The hand gestures can be learned by accessing the tool's free and short walk-through guide. You can use the app to change presentations' slides (with PowerPoint, Keynote) and to control media in the background (VLC, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music).

The Zesture extension can easily be installed from the Chrome Web Store. It connects to your desktop application and is strictly dependent on it. In order to be able to use gestures to control your media, in the browser, you need to have the desktop tool installed. In Chrome, the following apps are compatible with Zesture: YouTube, YouTube Music, Netflix, Spotify, Deezer. Also, a list with the corresponding hand gestures for those services is available in the app.

For example, some of the hand gestures you can (for both the desktop app and the extension) use are: you can shake your hand at the camera to mute/unmute a video in YouTube Music, go to the next video on Netflix with a hand swipe-right movement, show a thumbs up to skip forward your video 10 seconds, or enter the fullscreen mode (in YouTube Music) by zooming in at the camera with two fingers.

To conclude, Zesture seems like a really cool app. It is impressive that you can interact with your device's screen from almost 5 feet (approximately 1.5 meters) away. Moreover, the tool is fit for changing presentations' slides, controlling media that's in the background, accessing your favorite music while you do other activities, or watching your favorite videos without touching the keyboard. In the future, it would be really awesome to be able to use Zesture for more popular apps.