6 ms·

The Leap Motion Controller Now Supports Linux

124 points by onosendai 14y ago

zmanian 14y ago
Triggered a preorder... Without a doubt I'm going to use a product less if I have to boot into Windows...
- Kiro 14y ago
  It's comments like this that reminds me why I would never use Linux on my desktop.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Because you'll like it so much that you won't want to boot to an OS you like less to use some stuff? I guess that makes sense, it's also why I don't go to the amazing restaurant nearby but go to the shitty one. Only the shitty restaurant has tacos, and sometimes I want tacos.
jamesbritt 14y ago
Specifically Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 12.10, or newer; the SDK is distributed as a .deb file
- 14113 14y ago
  Also, specifically Ubuntu - it depends on a higher version of libc6 than is available in everything up to and including unstable in Debian repositories, it's only available in experimental.
  - voltagex_ 14y ago
    Also known as Steam syndrome. Does this trend worry anyone else? Limiting usage to one distro can't be a good thing.
    - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
      Hasn't stopped other distros from supporting Steam, with Valve's blessings no less. I use Steam on my Arch Linux machines with zero issues.
      - gee_totes 14y ago
        I also a happy user of Steam on Fedora. I can run full-screen games just fine (been playing Faster than Light recently).
    - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      Currently using Steam on Linux Mint. Works as well as it ever has.
      - ekianjo 14y ago
        Mint being more or less a fork of Ubuntu, saying it works on Mint does not say much about the support for other distros.
    - qdot76367 14y ago
      It usually relies on the libc of the system too, which means you are REALLY limited to bleeding edge ubuntu for these normally. OpenNI has been horrible about this.
    - yarrel 14y ago
      It's bad. Ubuntu is the corporate partner for companies that don't want to do Free Software.
    - 14113 14y ago
      It really worries me, especially as it's not just differently structured distros like arch that are out in the cold, but debian, which Ubunutu is derived from.
- trtg 14y ago
  I got it working just fine on gentoo, see the walkthrough here: http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-linux.html http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-li... wasn't that hard.
mindstab 14y ago
D: huh, kinda looks cool but I think I'd get tired of holding my hands up all day :P D: s'what keyboards, palm rests and elbow rests are for S: yeah, i hear you S: i played around with it for about 20 minutes and my arm was aching So yeah. this is me being skeptical
- oscilloscope 14y ago
  Mount the device at the end of an armrest.
  - tomsthumb 14y ago
    Standing desks would be a nice alternative too. Avoid the chair and have the thing facing upwards instead of forward. You'd have to work out how to keep your body out of the picture (no pun... sorry, I can't lie). Then you're really avoiding compression of any sort of nerves, except maybe in your feet.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  These are things I've come up against in writing apps for it. If I can lean my elbow on something it's OK. If I have to keep my hands up for very long, not so much fun. I've been trying to restrict the broader movements to less-common actions (mode changes, for example) and then use simpler, arm-on-table doable actions for other things.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- felxh 14y ago
  I hear ya. I imagine it more as an extra input device instead of the main one. Sort of like a remote control
- skore 14y ago
  You know what? A year ago, I would have shared the exact same scepticism. Now, I have an infant daughter who likes nothing more than being carried around, which has exponentially increased the number of activities I do with one hand, standing up. Being able to have a soundless controller that you don't need to pick up or fiddle around with in a way that disturbs a tiny human sleeping on your other arm sounds like absolute perfection.
kanja 14y ago
FINALLY YES
rjdagost 14y ago
Does anyone have any real-world experience using the Leap? It looks cool as hell but I'm hearing rumors that it doesn't work well in the presence of halogen / incandescent bulbs or direct sunlight. If I have to carefully control the lighting to be able to use it, that's a dealbreaker for me.
- jblock 14y ago
  It gets testy around walls. My experience is that in a moderately-lit situation (or a low-lit one) the thing works pretty great.
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    A few times I've had to move stuff out of the way because it would trigger a false hand presence. Lighting hasn't been an issue for me; I get assorted warning messages ("Bright light!" "Low light!") but it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in what I've been doing. I tried shining a laser pointer on but it didn't do anything. That was disappointing. :)
    - rjdagost 14y ago
      My understanding of it is that it uses near-infrared LEDs (slightly longer wavelength than visible light) to illuminate your hands, and that's why certain types of light sources that emit a lot of light at these wavelengths are alleged to cause trouble. It makes sense that a laser pointer wouldn't cause any interference because laser light is not in the passband that the cameras can see.
      - jamesbritt 14y ago
        Ah, thanks! I need to experiment with different light source then.
- etrautmann 14y ago
  Yes, I have a dev kit and have played around with a it a bunch. I'm very impressed with the low latency and high framerate (~110 fps via usb 2, rumored to go higher for usb 3.0). Latency is unquantified but barely perceptible even when moving quite quickly. The potential performance issue is with dropouts and interference. It's pretty easy to have detected fingers drop in and out, mostly due to fingers occluding each other. With a level of dynamics modeling/filtering built on top of the leap SDK, it may be possible to minimize the impact of dropouts. overall, it does seem like a reasonable way to interact with a computer, especially for drawing or manipulating objects, etc. I unfortunately can't post a video because we're building the leap into a trial clinical device at the moment and its out of my hands.
lvs 14y ago
Does anyone know why the Leap preorder page specifies a Phenom II or an i3/i5/i7 processor in the fine-print hardware requirements? Is it for a particular chip feature? Or is CPU overhead going to be a big issue?
- simcop2387 14y ago
  Possibly for sse3, which i think was first in phenom ii for amd. For intel its likely just listing everything but atom
  - TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
    but I have an Athlon II 640 which supports SSE -SSE4A? They also said that CPU overhead would be low.
    - trtg 14y ago
      I can say that even with this latest release, CPU usage on my fairly beefy i7 system is ~ 40% on one core.
bbwharris 14y ago
Played with one at sxsw. Ordered it right there. It is as impressive as it looks.
yarrel 14y ago
I'm going to ignore this until the protocol is reverse engineered and a Free Software driver is released.
- trtg 14y ago
  Well, I guess if you're that much of a diehard, just check out this project instead: http://www.duo3d.com/ http://www.duo3d.com/ they're planning on fully opensourcing everything. If you're annoyed because of the apparent dependency on ubuntu, note that I got things working on gentoo without much issue: http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-linux.html http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-li...

124 points by onosendai 14y ago

zmanian 14y ago

Triggered a preorder... Without a doubt I'm going to use a product less if I have to boot into Windows...

Kiro 14y ago
It's comments like this that reminds me why I would never use Linux on my desktop.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Because you'll like it so much that you won't want to boot to an OS you like less to use some stuff? I guess that makes sense, it's also why I don't go to the amazing restaurant nearby but go to the shitty one. Only the shitty restaurant has tacos, and sometimes I want tacos.

jamesbritt 14y ago

Specifically Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 12.10, or newer; the SDK is distributed as a .deb file

14113 14y ago
Also, specifically Ubuntu - it depends on a higher version of libc6 than is available in everything up to and including unstable in Debian repositories, it's only available in experimental.
- voltagex_ 14y ago
  Also known as Steam syndrome. Does this trend worry anyone else? Limiting usage to one distro can't be a good thing.
  - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
    Hasn't stopped other distros from supporting Steam, with Valve's blessings no less. I use Steam on my Arch Linux machines with zero issues.
    - gee_totes 14y ago
      I also a happy user of Steam on Fedora. I can run full-screen games just fine (been playing Faster than Light recently).
  - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
    Currently using Steam on Linux Mint. Works as well as it ever has.
    - ekianjo 14y ago
      Mint being more or less a fork of Ubuntu, saying it works on Mint does not say much about the support for other distros.
  - qdot76367 14y ago
    It usually relies on the libc of the system too, which means you are REALLY limited to bleeding edge ubuntu for these normally. OpenNI has been horrible about this.
  - yarrel 14y ago
    It's bad. Ubuntu is the corporate partner for companies that don't want to do Free Software.
  - 14113 14y ago
    It really worries me, especially as it's not just differently structured distros like arch that are out in the cold, but debian, which Ubunutu is derived from.
trtg 14y ago
I got it working just fine on gentoo, see the walkthrough here: http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-linux.html http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-li... wasn't that hard.

mindstab 14y ago

D: huh, kinda looks cool but I think I'd get tired of holding my hands up all day :P D: s'what keyboards, palm rests and elbow rests are for S: yeah, i hear you S: i played around with it for about 20 minutes and my arm was aching So yeah. this is me being skeptical

oscilloscope 14y ago
Mount the device at the end of an armrest.
- tomsthumb 14y ago
  Standing desks would be a nice alternative too. Avoid the chair and have the thing facing upwards instead of forward. You'd have to work out how to keep your body out of the picture (no pun... sorry, I can't lie). Then you're really avoiding compression of any sort of nerves, except maybe in your feet.
jamesbritt 14y ago
These are things I've come up against in writing apps for it. If I can lean my elbow on something it's OK. If I have to keep my hands up for very long, not so much fun. I've been trying to restrict the broader movements to less-common actions (mode changes, for example) and then use simpler, arm-on-table doable actions for other things.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
felxh 14y ago
I hear ya. I imagine it more as an extra input device instead of the main one. Sort of like a remote control
skore 14y ago
You know what? A year ago, I would have shared the exact same scepticism. Now, I have an infant daughter who likes nothing more than being carried around, which has exponentially increased the number of activities I do with one hand, standing up. Being able to have a soundless controller that you don't need to pick up or fiddle around with in a way that disturbs a tiny human sleeping on your other arm sounds like absolute perfection.

kanja 14y ago

FINALLY YES

rjdagost 14y ago

Does anyone have any real-world experience using the Leap? It looks cool as hell but I'm hearing rumors that it doesn't work well in the presence of halogen / incandescent bulbs or direct sunlight. If I have to carefully control the lighting to be able to use it, that's a dealbreaker for me.

jblock 14y ago
It gets testy around walls. My experience is that in a moderately-lit situation (or a low-lit one) the thing works pretty great.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  A few times I've had to move stuff out of the way because it would trigger a false hand presence. Lighting hasn't been an issue for me; I get assorted warning messages ("Bright light!" "Low light!") but it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in what I've been doing. I tried shining a laser pointer on but it didn't do anything. That was disappointing. :)
  - rjdagost 14y ago
    My understanding of it is that it uses near-infrared LEDs (slightly longer wavelength than visible light) to illuminate your hands, and that's why certain types of light sources that emit a lot of light at these wavelengths are alleged to cause trouble. It makes sense that a laser pointer wouldn't cause any interference because laser light is not in the passband that the cameras can see.
    - jamesbritt 14y ago
      Ah, thanks! I need to experiment with different light source then.
etrautmann 14y ago
Yes, I have a dev kit and have played around with a it a bunch. I'm very impressed with the low latency and high framerate (~110 fps via usb 2, rumored to go higher for usb 3.0). Latency is unquantified but barely perceptible even when moving quite quickly. The potential performance issue is with dropouts and interference. It's pretty easy to have detected fingers drop in and out, mostly due to fingers occluding each other. With a level of dynamics modeling/filtering built on top of the leap SDK, it may be possible to minimize the impact of dropouts. overall, it does seem like a reasonable way to interact with a computer, especially for drawing or manipulating objects, etc. I unfortunately can't post a video because we're building the leap into a trial clinical device at the moment and its out of my hands.

lvs 14y ago

Does anyone know why the Leap preorder page specifies a Phenom II or an i3/i5/i7 processor in the fine-print hardware requirements? Is it for a particular chip feature? Or is CPU overhead going to be a big issue?

simcop2387 14y ago
Possibly for sse3, which i think was first in phenom ii for amd. For intel its likely just listing everything but atom
- TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
  but I have an Athlon II 640 which supports SSE -SSE4A? They also said that CPU overhead would be low.
  - trtg 14y ago
    I can say that even with this latest release, CPU usage on my fairly beefy i7 system is ~ 40% on one core.

bbwharris 14y ago

Played with one at sxsw. Ordered it right there. It is as impressive as it looks.

yarrel 14y ago

I'm going to ignore this until the protocol is reverse engineered and a Free Software driver is released.

trtg 14y ago
Well, I guess if you're that much of a diehard, just check out this project instead: http://www.duo3d.com/ http://www.duo3d.com/ they're planning on fully opensourcing everything. If you're annoyed because of the apparent dependency on ubuntu, note that I got things working on gentoo without much issue: http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-linux.html http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-li...