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I was a Kickstarter backer, and have been developing experiments on it nearly full-time since it arrived about a week before Christmas. It was, amusingly, the f

I was a Kickstarter backer, and have been developing experiments on it nearly full-time since it arrived about a week before Christmas. It was, amusingly, the first time I've tracked a package minute-to-minute since we used to watch Santa's progress via NORAD on Christmas Eve. The crazy thing is that the hype was justified: it is pure magic. There's lots of negative peanut gallery elsewhere in this thread; they are just wrong and totally missing the point of what this team and device have accomplished, which is delivering a genuinely novel experience out-of-the-box, for about $500, with both a reasonable selection of samples on launch day AND a proper Unity SDK with good examples. It's one of those rare crowdfunded projects that shipped exactly on time (!), the drivers work, and the support forum is full of helpful people who reply to questions in a timely manner. My only regret is that I didn't spring for the opportunity to buy a 15" for $2000 when I had the chance.

kgwxd 8y ago
Did you get the leap with it too? If so, do you think that's worth the extra $100?
- peteforde 8y ago
  Coincidentally, I backed the Leap on Kickstarter back in 2011 or whenever it was, as well. They've updated the software but never [needed?] to release a v2 of their hardware. My reply on this is: it's a mixed bag, and while several of their launch demos indeed make use of Leap, I was somewhat surprised by the degree to which there seems to be an undercurrent of disdain for it in the Looking Glass ecosystem, which is still small enough to be a first-name basis kind of affair. (eg it's a perfect time to get in on something verified awesome) From my perspective as a Unity dev, getting the Leap integration working was the hardest part. In fact, if I'm honest, I gave up before succeeding. Here's the double-edged sword: apparently, getting 1:1 mapping between the Leap and whatever you're building is tricky... but kids freaking love it. So, if you're looking to get young people excited or planning to build something that only makes sense with a Leap, then sure... go for it. However, it's tiring to use for long periods and I find only half-good at continuously tracking fingers. Good news is that there's apparently SDK support coming for depth cameras which could go a long way towards replacing the need for the Leap in the ecosystem. It seems like the hard thing which Leap figured out was the identification of fingers and gesture tracking. There's lots of devices out there which can do cool depth or time-of-flight sensing, but you still have to process a stream and make sense of it in near-realtime. So for a $100 gadget that does a 70% good job of this without a lot of coding smarts required, Leap was ahead of its time. Sorry, I know this was a bit all over the place and I sound like I'm waffling. Perhaps it comes down to a combination of "is $100 a big deal to you?" + "do you imagine building apps that rely on gesture control?" + "are you patient when it comes to iterative troubleshooting and integration in Unity?"
  - kgwxd 8y ago
    Thanks, that was very informative. I think I'll just get the display and get the leap separate if I find myself wanting. It's only $90 on it's own anyway. The extra $10 for the case and cleaning cloth is cool, but it's never going to leave my desk so I'm not worried about transport and I already have several microfiber cloths.
    - samatman 8y ago
      YAGNI is a great rule of thumb but I gotta say: I always make an exception for cases, and I've always been right about that thus far.

kgwxd 8y ago

Did you get the leap with it too? If so, do you think that's worth the extra $100?

peteforde 8y ago
Coincidentally, I backed the Leap on Kickstarter back in 2011 or whenever it was, as well. They've updated the software but never [needed?] to release a v2 of their hardware. My reply on this is: it's a mixed bag, and while several of their launch demos indeed make use of Leap, I was somewhat surprised by the degree to which there seems to be an undercurrent of disdain for it in the Looking Glass ecosystem, which is still small enough to be a first-name basis kind of affair. (eg it's a perfect time to get in on something verified awesome) From my perspective as a Unity dev, getting the Leap integration working was the hardest part. In fact, if I'm honest, I gave up before succeeding. Here's the double-edged sword: apparently, getting 1:1 mapping between the Leap and whatever you're building is tricky... but kids freaking love it. So, if you're looking to get young people excited or planning to build something that only makes sense with a Leap, then sure... go for it. However, it's tiring to use for long periods and I find only half-good at continuously tracking fingers. Good news is that there's apparently SDK support coming for depth cameras which could go a long way towards replacing the need for the Leap in the ecosystem. It seems like the hard thing which Leap figured out was the identification of fingers and gesture tracking. There's lots of devices out there which can do cool depth or time-of-flight sensing, but you still have to process a stream and make sense of it in near-realtime. So for a $100 gadget that does a 70% good job of this without a lot of coding smarts required, Leap was ahead of its time. Sorry, I know this was a bit all over the place and I sound like I'm waffling. Perhaps it comes down to a combination of "is $100 a big deal to you?" + "do you imagine building apps that rely on gesture control?" + "are you patient when it comes to iterative troubleshooting and integration in Unity?"
- kgwxd 8y ago
  Thanks, that was very informative. I think I'll just get the display and get the leap separate if I find myself wanting. It's only $90 on it's own anyway. The extra $10 for the case and cleaning cloth is cool, but it's never going to leave my desk so I'm not worried about transport and I already have several microfiber cloths.
  - samatman 8y ago
    YAGNI is a great rule of thumb but I gotta say: I always make an exception for cases, and I've always been right about that thus far.