You are two minutes away from browsing with your hands
This is hands.hinow.ai before it reaches the Chrome Web Store, so it installs by hand. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay, and you can remove it in one click.
- Chrome 116 or newer
- A webcam
- About two minutes
Part 1
Put it in Chrome
Unzip it somewhere it can stay
Documents/hands works. Do not delete or move that folder afterwards: Chrome loads the extension from there every time it starts.
Open the extensions page
Chrome does not let a web page send you there, so this address has to be pasted into the address bar yourself.
chrome://extensionsTurn on Developer mode
It is the switch in the top right corner of that page.
Click Load unpacked and pick the folder
Choose the folder you unzipped, the one with manifest.json inside it. The hand icon appears in the Chrome toolbar.
Part 2
Turn it on
Open any page with links
A news site is perfect. Click the hand icon in the toolbar, then Turn on.
Allow the camera, once
Chrome asks in a tab the extension opens itself. The recognition runs in an invisible document, and an invisible document cannot show that prompt. Allowing it once counts for every site.
Show both hands
Two panels appear in the corners of the screen listing every gesture, and the one being recognised lights up.
the two gesture panels are on screen and one of the lines lights up as you move your hand. From there, an open hand scrolls the page.
The four poses, and nothing else to memorise
One hand scrolls, the other picks and clicks. Which hand does what is yours to choose, and there is a left-handed mode. Both hands together change pages.
What helps recognition
Even light on your hands. Strong backlight, such as sitting with a window behind you, is what gets in the way most. The camera has to frame you from the waist up.
What does not exist yet
Dragging, zooming, rotating and typing. Scrolling, stepping through links, clicking and changing pages work today on any site open in Chrome. You still need the keyboard to write.
Two warnings that are normal
Chrome shows a notice about developer mode extensions every time it starts, which is expected for a manual install and goes away once the extension is on the store. There is also no auto-update this way: to update, delete the old folder, unzip the new one in the same place and press reload on the extensions page.
The camera never leaves your machine
Every frame is analysed on your own computer and discarded. No image is stored, not on disk and not in the browser, and the extension makes no network request at all.
Tell us how it went
We are in open beta, and what you report decides which gesture gets built next. Worth reporting: what was not recognised, what was recognised when you did not mean it, and which site it got stuck on.