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Leap Motion: Amazing, Revolutionary, Useless

173 points by kevin_morrill 13y ago

CRidge 13y ago
Amazing, Revolutionary, Useless... and let's not forget buggy! And with horrible support... My device was not able to recalibrate, a problem shared with many others should I believe the forum. A week or two has passed, and no reply from the makers of the device, neither on the forum or on my bug report. I guess I just got another hunk of junk to put in the failed-devices-closet... :-(
- alternize 13y ago
  same here. my device reports "bright light detected" even when there's not enough ambient light to see the keys on my keyboard. turning off the monitor seems to help, but...
  - vanderZwan 13y ago
    It works by detecting infrared light - the lightsource is likely an infrared one that you can't see, possibly your monitor.
    - alternize 13y ago
      absolutely. yet if it won't work properly with the monitor turned on, there's little use for it.
jecs321 13y ago
gorilla arms http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
Semaphor 13y ago
This is why I decided to back Mycestro [1] and skipped on the LeapMotion. While it won't support multi-hand (unless you have 2 devices) and multi-finger stuff, at least it should be able to easily recognize any motion I make with it on. [1] http://www.mycestro.com/ http://www.mycestro.com/
- nashequilibrium 13y ago
  This monrity report concept has been vetted on HN for years and the consensus is that nobody believed that this felt natural. I was watching a steve jobs interview about the ipad and he spoke about how natural it was for people to point to stuff, even as little kids. This is so intutive that we now see two year old kids controlling iphones to view youtube. The minority report interface for now is not natural maybe as the design of the world and tech morph, this may become useful but as of now it is not. The tech is really cool and i rather see these guys take a crack at this and see if people like it, than seeing another snapchat valued at 800mill. The advancement i am excited about right now is a mix between chromecast and Mircosoft's Illumiroom, http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/01/is-microsofts-illumiroom-the-future-of-gaming http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/01/is-microsofts-illumir....
- draugadrotten 13y ago
  Expensive. 30 USD shipping for a tiny < 50g light device. Will they send John Travolta delivering these things in person using his jet, or what is up with that?
  - dsego 13y ago
    How is that expensive? You pay more for a good mouse.
    - nodata 13y ago
      30 dollars shipping for a mouse?
      - dsego 13y ago
        oops, I thought that was the item price.
  - jheriko 13y ago
    you can arrange john travolta in a jet for 30 USD? that sounds like a bargain. :)
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Thank you for the most hilarity I'm likely to encounter today! That's a great article.
nixarn 13y ago
My first impressions with the Leap is similar. Got one, played around with it, felt kinda useless, haven't "touched it" since.
- lvs 13y ago
  As another early adopter, I have to say that it's disappointing how much the company is relying on "the community" to generate their business model for them, rather than properly develop the software themselves.
tocomment 13y ago
I think combining a kinnect and several leaps with an Oculus Rift might be great. That way you can use your own body motions within the rift. The kinnect would be for gross motions and the leaps would be for detecting fine motions. What do you guys think?
- replax 13y ago
  Well, as kinect already is capable of tracking your fingers, i am not sure the leap would be very useful. rather a slightly better kinect..
  - tocomment 13y ago
    Actually perhaps the leap could be placed on the front of the Oculus Rift. The only time you'd be doing detailed things with your fingers is when you're looking at them right? So at those time the leap would have a view of your hands. Then the kinnect (I guess one on each wall) would monitor larger movements.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      The Leap doesn't have the range to do this. My brother has one and it's striking how narrow the field of view is.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "kinect already is capable of tracking your fingers" I will nitpick the word selection that "capable" is nearly useless in a user interface. It needs to be nearly 100% reliable or its useless. 99% of my interaction with Kinect is my daughter crying that she can't navigate menus in her dance games and is all frustrated, followed by me being all frustrated and swearing about how if only I could bypass this POS and use the buttons on the controller I would be done twenty seconds ago and I hate Kinect with a passion. It works fine for gross motor like my daughters dance games but useless for fine motor. Perhaps in the future I will write SQL statements by performing an interpretive dance at work, but I hope not. The failure rate is vital... If I'm typing this at 100 WPM, which is probably about right, then a 99% motion detection success rate means I'd swear and hate motion detection and have to stop and fix an error, what, every six seconds or so? All day long? Forget that, I'm sticking to the keyboard and mouse, I don't have the patience for 99% success.
melling 13y ago
Can someone build something like this but only have it recognize a small set simple gestures? Using it to simply browse the web would be cool. If you could throw in a way to click build in Xcode and IntelliJ then I'm sold.
will118 13y ago
I find the Leap part of BTT (BetterTouchTool) is actually... err.. use-worthy..? Neither useful nor useless. I've got some really cool (still a big part for me) and useful stuff working, augmenting my mouse/keyboard use. For example, a finger to the left minimises and two fingers to the right opens a list of recently used apps. Yet I'm very conscious that everything would just be better suited to a keyboard shortcut.. I never bothered with Touchless and mouse emulation things; years of 2D GUI design isn't suited to this kind of interface. "Midnight" is a my favourite Leap app but I think that's just an iPad app that lends itself very well to the leap input too.
seivan 13y ago
"Hey so LeapMotion is still being developed, I better hurry to write a blog post and complain about it before they improve it".
- davedx 13y ago
  If it's still being developed why is it on retail for $80? Most people make sure their product is useful and working before selling it to people. If you bought a car and the brakes mostly worked, would you be happy?
  - ewang1 13y ago
    The hardware works. It's mostly lacking in the software side, which I presume will get better over time with 3rd party apps in the Leap App Store, and also when existing applications start implementing the functionality.
  - oscilloscope 13y ago
    If the year was 1896, I probably would be happy. Brakes were far less functional and reliable in the first 20 years of the automobile's history.
- chollida1 13y ago
  > "Hey so LeapMotion is still being developed, I better hurry to write a blog post and complain about it before they improve it" If you take someone's money and give them a product they have every right to review it and point out both the good and bad points about your product. I thought the review was very fair, and I"ll be the folks at leap would to. They just got a bit of press and some tips on what one of their clients thinks is broken.
nairteashop 13y ago
I think the article is a bit unfair. I've been playing around with a leap for a few days and am suitably impressed. What works very well with the device is coarse movements, especially relative hand movements. What doesn't work so well is finer gestures (1/100th of a millimeter motions of all 10 fingers? ha). This app is a perfect example: https://airspace.leapmotion.com/apps/cyber-science-motion https://airspace.leapmotion.com/apps/cyber-science-motion You can use your hands, kept flat, to spin around / zoom a 3-D rendering of a human skull. You can also point at specific elements on the skull. Both of these coarse gestures work great, and the experience is incredible. However, the app also unfortunately has a "click" gesture to pick apart elements of the skull - you click by spreading out your thumb and then folding it back in. Works terribly, as this fine gesture is detected maybe 50% of the time. It should've simply been left out. I showed this app to my dad, who's a doctor, and he was blown away. He was visibly excited about the potential for a device he can use to spin around CT and MRI scans in the operating room without having to touch a mouse/joystick - currently he has a person doing this for him to keep things sterile, and this can sometimes be frustrating. The leap, at least in its current incarnation, reminds me a lot of Google glass. Both Google/LEAP and their proponents say the devices are going to change the world. Maybe, maybe not. Neither device works perfectly like what you see in the heavily edited demo videos. But both can be invaluable in certain specialized fields, today, as long as folks are realistic about what can be done with them.
- Keyframe 13y ago
  What's the lag like?
  - nairteashop 13y ago
    Not noticeable at all (I'm testing on a 2 yr old Macbook Pro).
    - Keyframe 13y ago
      I think I have a use for this if their SDK is good. I'll check it out. Thanks!
    - 13y ago
nine_k 13y ago
If all you do is browse the web, a touchpad is often all you need. For text editing / word processing, a good keyboard is often all what's needed, and the use of mouse is often discouraged by gurus. I still can easily imagine using the Leap Motion device while editing images and especially 3D models. Even more I can imagine using it in games, especially games written with this device in mind. I don't own the device but I tried it. What's great is that you don't need to wave your hands in the air, Minority report-style; moving your fingers us enough. I wish it was built into a keyboard; it would replace a touchpad / trackpoint easily, adding much more capabilities. BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992?
- nairteashop 13y ago
  > I wish it was built into a keyboard This may very well happen if the Leap takes off. They already have distribution deals with HP and Asus; the next logical step would be building it into the laptop. Should be quite possible since the device is small and relatively cheap.
- vanderZwan 13y ago
  > BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992? I came here to state this. I'm studying interaction design, while I understand the author's frustrations, the problems do largely seem to be to be poor interface design for how to use the data the leap collects about your hand (and the visualiser demonstrates how accurate that data is). Basically, the current basic demos try to mimick a mouse by way of using extremely clunky gestures. That won't work: for this to take off, the interface needs to be designed from the start with gestures in mind. I have some ideas on how to do that, but it will require some further tinkering and testing. The sensor itself is amazing and in my experience very reliable - although I might be biased after having tried to design gesture based interfaces with the Kinect and not succeeding due to its technical limitations and unreliability.
- kabdib 13y ago
  Mice worked pretty well in 1992. They worked well in 1984 on the Mac, and five years before that, on Xerox hardware and LMs (though they suffered from "really small ball bearing" disease, and easily got dirty or cranky and refused to roll well). With a mouse, you have at least one button you can signal an event with. Imagine doing a UI where you didn't have a mouse button. All you can do is move and point. That's a Kinect, for the most part. I haven't used a LeapMotion, but I suspect it's the same problem; there's no way to generate a discrete event. It's all fuzzy. Did your fingers touch? Did you wave in a particular way? Some fuzzy matcher is pumping out "90% probability of event X, 75% probability of event Y" every few milliseconds, and it's up to higher layers to turn this goo into decisions that people are happy with. It's hard at all layers. I really think you need a button, a clicker. Something "hard" in the UI that slams a voice of reason into that fuzzy tower that's continually only able to /guess/ what you're trying to do. [We wanted a clicker on Kinect. Politically impossible. I think it would have helped a lot.]
mattdanger 13y ago
I played with a LeapMotion last week and was impressed by it but within 5 minutes my arm was tired.
- chiph 13y ago
  The local BestBuy had one set up & I played with it for a few minutes. Really Interesting, but not all that applicable to how I use a computer on a daily basis. I think it's greatest potential will be in gaming. Imagine casting a spell by using the appropriate arcane hand gestures. Or swinging a sword - it can tell the difference between an overhand and a side cut, and a blocking move.
  - gdulli 13y ago
    > I think it's greatest potential will be in gaming. Imagine casting a spell by using the appropriate arcane hand gestures. Or swinging a sword - it can tell the difference between an overhand and a side cut, and a blocking move. I've had a Wii, and a Kinect, and gesturing as input got annoying very quickly with both. It's something that just sounds fun, but isn't. Even with the Nintendo DS, when you'd use a stylus to trace a certain shape to trigger an action, it didn't translate well to sustained gameplay. Though it remained workable longer than with Wii/Kinect gaming. Simple swipes with a stylus or finger (on a screen) continue to work well, whereas even simple arm or hand gestures quickly become annoying and fatiguing. It turns out that pressing buttons works just fine, and is actually ideal, even if other input methods sound sexier.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Your comment reminds me of something pointed out during a boxing match many moons ago. Which was essentially a comment about how hard it actually is to simply hold up one's arms and fists over quite small periods of time, let alone constantly move them around, then start punching. Its actually quite draining. Current input schemes involve a lot of support of the hands and arms. This waving hands around in the air offers no physical support. So, I think that its use will be limited to a subset of tasks, where it will be revolutionary, but much harder to integrate in to general use. Simply because of fatigue.
vermontdevil 13y ago
Four students at RIT are using this to develop a sign to text app. http://motionsavvy.com/ http://motionsavvy.com/ So it does have potential/use.
- rpwilcox 13y ago
  Fascinating. What's annoying about computer/video based sign instructions is the lack of feedback. "Did I get this sign right or do I just think I have it right?" If MotionSavvy can notify me when I get it wrong, very nice!
nwh 13y ago
Is all writing seriously boiling down to animated GIFs of "reactions"?
- simias 13y ago
  I had the same reaction after seeing the first two gifs but the rest are mostly demonstrative and to the point. On a side note, it's still quite amazing that gifs are still the simplest way to show short video clips on the web.
  - nwh 13y ago
    They're really not. Embedded video is a fraction of the size, and faster to render to boot.
    - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
      Is that true? What kind of encoding are we talking about?
      - nwh 13y ago
        https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/ was on the front page a day or so ago, it grabs GIFs and re-encodes them into video (MP4 and OGGv). The results are much smaller and, in my local experimentation, are much, much faster to render than the original files. There's some technical details at https://mediacru.sh/demo https://mediacru.sh/demo . Draw your own conclusions, but that's how I have experienced it.
        jodrellblank 13y ago
        The gif loaded and played seamlessly. The video was a placeholder which loaded a full screen QuickTime window that delayed for 5-10 seconds then played. Claim "gifs are still the simplest way to show short video clips on the web." agreed.
mbesto 13y ago
There's a general assumption that the Minority Report interface is the interface of the future.[0] There are few reasons why I'm saying no. 1. First and foremost, gorilla arm.[1] My presumption with the "interface of the future" is that it's needed for prolonged use. So, first thing's first, the interface can't be one where our arms require our hands to be higher than our elbows. Unless of course our species got a whole lot stronger in the forearm to support such a feature. Don't see our species doing that anytime soon. 2. Feedback - Right now the feedback loop is eye->brain->hand->brain->eye (repeat) where the hand's pressure against a solid surface is the most important feedback response. With the minority report style interface we currently have a massive delay (comparatively speaking) between the brain->hand->brain loop. We also have to iterate the whole loop much more because we need to constantly assess with our eye where our hand is in 3D (not digital) space. Now let's say the technology gets much better and reduces this to 5ms. We are now bound by the differences of our synapses firing between touch and light. I could be wrong, but it's my assumption that due to the speed of light being the way that it is, that "touch" will always beat "sight" in performance. For prolonged used applications my bet is on adaptive surfaces. For short term (turning an stove on, flicking a light switch, etc) interfaces I potentially see this Minority Report style interface happening. But does the benefit cost of innovation? Personally I think we are fooling ourselves. [0] - http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit... [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nairteashop 13y ago
  I agree with you that a Minority Report style interface doesn't make sense as the sole interface to a PC. However, something like the Leap IMO makes a great secondary interface to a keyboard and mouse/trackpad. I'm using a Leap controller right now, with BTT for Mac/Touchless for gesture-based control. As I read through a page I can simply stick my hand out and wave it up to scroll down the page - it's a phenomenal experience for passive reading as I don't have to break focus to reach out for my mouse/trackpad. I've also configured some additional coarse gestures to launch mission control etc. Using the Leap for such brief, coarse gestures avoids both the problems you've mentioned because my arm is resting on my desk, with fingers just a few inches above my trackpad/keyboard, so no "gorilla arm" problems; the gestures are coarse, requiring very little hand-eye co-ordination and finally, the gestures are brief so no fatigue problems. All of this breaks down once you start trying to do any finer-control gestures, like trying to point at links and click on them like the OP tried to do. IMO the Leap should be used to augment the keyboard/mouse as a secondary interaction interface that you use occasionally.
tsenkov 13y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't tried Leap Motion, yet. Did I get this right? Leap Motion vs. Kinect: - LM is smaller (significantly); - LM is cheaper (significantly); - LM is more accurate (significantly); - LM has almost no real apps (mostly concept demos). If these are all correct I find Scott's post nothing more than a "normal", "the competition sucks, too", Microsoft type of post.
- AndrewDucker 13y ago
  Very different markets. The LM is very short range, so you couldn't use it like a Kinect. And you wouldn't plug a Kinect into your PC to watch your fingers move either.
utopkara 13y ago
I find Leap Motion quite accurate. You will quickly get used to the convenience of gestures with BetterTouchTool, and wish you had it on computers which don't have Leap Motion. Otherwise, The gestures used by apps is something that needs to be carefully crafted. For instance Touchless, the mouse replacement, simply doesn't cut it; you'll find yourself reaching out for the mouse/trackball/trackpad within the first 10 seconds. The leap gets effected by strong light sources on the ceiling. You might want to use it facing downwards if that is an issue. Also, if you are wearing a watch or a ring, it might get confused with the reflection.
hoffcoder 13y ago
I think that the newer Kinect 2.0 will be able to take care of all these more sophisticated gestures. When compared to the Leapmotion it has much better range and its accuracy will improve now too.
iekadou 13y ago
Leap Motion – Just a toy or the future? - http://tech.particulate.me/ http://tech.particulate.me/
nsxwolf 13y ago
It's obviously not a replacement for a mouse and keyboard and never will be. I could see some useful gesture based macros, like "throw your hands up in total frustration" to rage-quit an app or open a distraction-free full screen editor.
zero_intp 13y ago
I think a ring to click might be the best answer. Clicking (for me) works better with a tactile response.
mrbill 13y ago
This is exactly my experience with the Leap unit; I played with it for a couple of days. Then uninstalled all the drivers and put it back in the box, will try again in a few months to see if things have improved.
bennyg 13y ago
A coworker and I have written some gesture recognizers for Leap in C# and Objective-C hoping to make the thing more usable and easier for other developers to write software using it. Hate to do a shameless plug, but both can be found here: https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-ObjC https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-ObjC https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-CSharp https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-CSharp --- We're hoping to start the community foundation for making tools that help make Leap extremely usable from both a development and from a user experience standpoint. The Leap is awesome, beautiful and we think can be used in a myriad of applications.
colmvp 13y ago
Well jeez, let's not even bother then. Wendell, shut off the generator, Scott thinks we're useless.
jdietrich 13y ago
Believe it or not, this is a century-old problem. The theremin is an electronic musical instrument, played by waving your hands in the air. It works by detecting RF capacitance between a pair of antennae and the player's body. You can see the Theremin being played at the YouTube link below. Playing the theremin is incredibly difficult, due to the lack of tactile feedback. The human body is very poorly equipped to point precisely at an arbitrary position in free space. Only a handful of players can achieve anything better than squeaky science fiction noises and even virtuoso players struggle constantly with intonation. Modern theremin technique depends on a system of discrete hand gestures, which reduce the player's dependency upon coarse proprioception. If the Leap Motion is to have any real utility, it will need phenomenally sophisticated software, to interpret intent from hand motion rather than simply passing the hand location as a raw input. The human body simply isn't capable of making the kind of movements that the designers of Leap Motion seem to expect, even with a great deal of practice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq_N-gjEpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq_N-gjEpI
- lifeformed 13y ago
  I wonder if you could add some tactile feedback with some precision fans? A grid of fans below your hand and in front of it could provide a gradient of subtle pressure. Or maybe a fan on some sensitive servos that track each fingertip?
  - vilya 13y ago
    That's pretty much exactly the idea behind the "Aireal" project from Disney Research: http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/aireal/ http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/aireal/
- lcedp 13y ago
  Thank you for insight. Really interesting. But popular sci-fi movies features like waving hands in the air / parallel to the floor touch screens // transparent monochrome screens(not HUDs) just seem so obviously wrong to me and I don't understand why so many people fail to see it.
- 13y ago
nikunjk 13y ago
Touchless sucks on AirSpace. Try BetterTouchTool. The gesture tracking and usability of that App is incredible.
deanclatworthy 13y ago
I've been experimenting with the LeapMotion at work today, and some initial observations: - There's no apps yet that have made me go wow. - The range is quite small - The motion of hovering an arm in front of you is extremely tiring after more than 10-15minutes. Try holding your arm out in front of you for that long without moving and you'll see why. The reason Kinect was a success is that you can take real-world activities such as dancing, jumping over obstacles, jogging (on the spot), and translate them into an interactive digital version. With the Leap, I've yet to think of a real world scenario where I would be waving my hands in front of my chest, that would translate well into a digital experience. Conducting an orchestra would be one good application for this, perhaps training conductors, but I couldn't think of anything else.
imroot 13y ago
I did some investigative work to look at if we could use the leap motions to replace the touch-sensitive overlays that we strap to 60" TV's for our on-air traffic folks to use during their segments -- the overlays run about 2500, and if we could replace them with a leap motion and get the same functionality with less cost, this could allow us to roll out the traffic application to more stations than the six or so that are currently using our in-house traffic application. The first thing that I noticed was that it couldn't take the range of the 60" television that we had hooked up to the traffic software, so I scaled this down to a Thunderbolt display, and tried again. In my tests, the recognition for the thumb was sporadic, if not completely missing -- in both my (fat guy) test as well as during the testing of the local personality (non-fat guy). I then made some changes to our software to try to minimize the effects of the natural movements of the hand -- I turned down the sensitivity to attempt to compensate for the normal shakes and jitters that you have with your hands. This gave it a better feel, but, the traffic reporters still missed the feeling of touching the display and watching that display interact with your touch. They're still neat devices (I really wanted to say neat toys, but, I don't want to cheapen the work that the Leap Motion folks put into this thing), but, I'm having a hard time implementing them in a way that would work for us...so they're sitting on my shelf, waiting for a project that could use them (or, take them to my local hackerspace should I not find a good project for them shortly)...
rhema 13y ago
The biggest problem with the leap that I have seen (there is one in my lab) is that it sees hands spread out evenly on the surface really well, and that's about it. If you do a thumbs up gesture (or a rude gesture when it doesn't work), the fingers get occluded by the bottom of your hand. Think about you hands as five friends trying to play connect at the same time and you can imagine the kinds of occlusion problems you might face. Still, I, and probably others, like the leap. It's not useless. You just have to exploit it the right way, looking for natural interface design beyond a Tom Cruse movie. The biggest free air interaction problems are (1) making visible what the available gestures are, and (2) providing tangible or visible feedback. You don't get to see and feel the the interaction like you can with a keyboard or less digitally inclined tools.
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Maybe camera is just the way to go then. There's Kinect, of course, but Intel is getting into the act as well: http://click.intel.com/intelsdk/Intel_Developer_Kit-0-C92.aspx http://click.intel.com/intelsdk/Intel_Developer_Kit-0-C92.as... Video demos here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-computing-sdk http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-co...
JamesCRR 13y ago
Nice example of someone adding a leap motion controller to their site, GoSquared: https://www.gosquared.com/blog/playing-around-with-the-new-leap-motion-controller-on-the-web https://www.gosquared.com/blog/playing-around-with-the-new-l... I'm not going to argue this demonstrates utility, but it does show some good recognition of smaller gestures.
wesley 13y ago
Looks like a much better alternative just revealed itself: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haptix/haptix-multitouch-reinvented http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haptix/haptix-multitouch...
nicenemo 13y ago
Can it be that I saw a prototype at ICT Delta conference may 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands?
egypturnash 13y ago
I've got my Leap doing what I bought it for: controlling iTunes when my hands are covered in hair dye. [1] If I can get it to do more, awesome. But that's enough for now. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O6sR0PKofc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O6sR0PKofc
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  Then you got ripped off! https://flutterapp.com/ https://flutterapp.com/
  - egypturnash 13y ago
    When it's at my desk, my laptop is connected to an external monitor and keyboard; it runs closed. Flutter is of no use to me.
    - Domenic_S 13y ago
      Why does it run closed? It doesn't have to.
      - egypturnash 13y ago
        Short answer: I like it that way. Long answer: When it's plugged into the external monitor/keyboard/wacom tablet/leap/etc, the laptop is on a shelf beneath the main desk surface. It's completely out of view when I'm standing there working. I've got a 24" monitor on an adjustable arm; I don't need a second screen. Or want one; if I have two screens next to each other I inevitably go crazy if they're not exactly the same color profile. (Photo of my setup: http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/08/desk-porn.jpg http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/08/desk...)
mdaniel 13y ago
I also have one, and after seeing what it sees during the orientation I wondered how many of its problems could be cured by having a second sensor that one could position about a foot away from the other to give the Leap stereo vision. I am speaking totally out of school because I don't know if that would create more problems than it solves, though. On my phone, to apologies if this is a duplicate of another thread.
pbreit 13y ago
I think the "useless" comment misses that its sweet spot utility is unknown at this point. And I'm not sure "general purpose computer input device" is going to be such a sweet spot. The precision "problem" can obviously be addressed with software. That said, I do believe the absence of killer utility is a problem for Leap right now since it came out with a decent bang and now the less than favorable reviews are dripping in. I think they would have done themselves a significant favor by having a killer app ready from the outset. I also think they need to encourage people to look beyond simple human-computer interaction. Apparently these things could map a whole football game or count the number of people at a concert. Things like that. I also think the commercial angles will be better for business.
- lvs 13y ago
  The onus was on the company to figure out what its "sweet spot utility" was before launch, don't you think?
  - pbreit 13y ago
    Yep: "I think they would have done themselves a significant favor by having a killer app ready from the outset."
    - lvs 13y ago
      Sorry -- yes, chiming in with agreement.
JabavuAdams 13y ago
Question: does the LEAP need to be flat on the table, or could you hang it around your neck to get mobile gesture input in a vertical plane?
sytelus 13y ago
What surprised me after little digging up was that Leap Motion does not support point cloud. That means you can't get 3D world as points in space from Leap Motion. Their founders says Leap Motion isn't designed for this purpose. This means you can't use Leap Motion for applications such as 3D scanning. Personally I think that would be much more exciting then ability to move windows by waving.

173 points by kevin_morrill 13y ago

Amazing, Revolutionary, Useless... and let's not forget buggy! And with horrible support... My device was not able to recalibrate, a problem shared with many others should I believe the forum. A week or two has passed, and no reply from the makers of the device, neither on the forum or on my bug report. I guess I just got another hunk of junk to put in the failed-devices-closet... :-(

alternize 13y ago
same here. my device reports "bright light detected" even when there's not enough ambient light to see the keys on my keyboard. turning off the monitor seems to help, but...
- vanderZwan 13y ago
  It works by detecting infrared light - the lightsource is likely an infrared one that you can't see, possibly your monitor.
  - alternize 13y ago
    absolutely. yet if it won't work properly with the monitor turned on, there's little use for it.

jecs321 13y ago

gorilla arms http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html

Semaphor 13y ago

This is why I decided to back Mycestro [1] and skipped on the LeapMotion. While it won't support multi-hand (unless you have 2 devices) and multi-finger stuff, at least it should be able to easily recognize any motion I make with it on. [1] http://www.mycestro.com/ http://www.mycestro.com/

nashequilibrium 13y ago
This monrity report concept has been vetted on HN for years and the consensus is that nobody believed that this felt natural. I was watching a steve jobs interview about the ipad and he spoke about how natural it was for people to point to stuff, even as little kids. This is so intutive that we now see two year old kids controlling iphones to view youtube. The minority report interface for now is not natural maybe as the design of the world and tech morph, this may become useful but as of now it is not. The tech is really cool and i rather see these guys take a crack at this and see if people like it, than seeing another snapchat valued at 800mill. The advancement i am excited about right now is a mix between chromecast and Mircosoft's Illumiroom, http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/01/is-microsofts-illumiroom-the-future-of-gaming http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/01/is-microsofts-illumir....
draugadrotten 13y ago
Expensive. 30 USD shipping for a tiny < 50g light device. Will they send John Travolta delivering these things in person using his jet, or what is up with that?
- dsego 13y ago
  How is that expensive? You pay more for a good mouse.
  - nodata 13y ago
    30 dollars shipping for a mouse?
    - dsego 13y ago
      oops, I thought that was the item price.
- jheriko 13y ago
  you can arrange john travolta in a jet for 30 USD? that sounds like a bargain. :)

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Thank you for the most hilarity I'm likely to encounter today! That's a great article.

nixarn 13y ago

My first impressions with the Leap is similar. Got one, played around with it, felt kinda useless, haven't "touched it" since.

lvs 13y ago
As another early adopter, I have to say that it's disappointing how much the company is relying on "the community" to generate their business model for them, rather than properly develop the software themselves.

tocomment 13y ago

I think combining a kinnect and several leaps with an Oculus Rift might be great. That way you can use your own body motions within the rift. The kinnect would be for gross motions and the leaps would be for detecting fine motions. What do you guys think?

replax 13y ago
Well, as kinect already is capable of tracking your fingers, i am not sure the leap would be very useful. rather a slightly better kinect..
- tocomment 13y ago
  Actually perhaps the leap could be placed on the front of the Oculus Rift. The only time you'd be doing detailed things with your fingers is when you're looking at them right? So at those time the leap would have a view of your hands. Then the kinnect (I guess one on each wall) would monitor larger movements.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    The Leap doesn't have the range to do this. My brother has one and it's striking how narrow the field of view is.
- VLM 13y ago
  "kinect already is capable of tracking your fingers" I will nitpick the word selection that "capable" is nearly useless in a user interface. It needs to be nearly 100% reliable or its useless. 99% of my interaction with Kinect is my daughter crying that she can't navigate menus in her dance games and is all frustrated, followed by me being all frustrated and swearing about how if only I could bypass this POS and use the buttons on the controller I would be done twenty seconds ago and I hate Kinect with a passion. It works fine for gross motor like my daughters dance games but useless for fine motor. Perhaps in the future I will write SQL statements by performing an interpretive dance at work, but I hope not. The failure rate is vital... If I'm typing this at 100 WPM, which is probably about right, then a 99% motion detection success rate means I'd swear and hate motion detection and have to stop and fix an error, what, every six seconds or so? All day long? Forget that, I'm sticking to the keyboard and mouse, I don't have the patience for 99% success.

melling 13y ago

Can someone build something like this but only have it recognize a small set simple gestures? Using it to simply browse the web would be cool. If you could throw in a way to click build in Xcode and IntelliJ then I'm sold.

will118 13y ago

I find the Leap part of BTT (BetterTouchTool) is actually... err.. use-worthy..? Neither useful nor useless. I've got some really cool (still a big part for me) and useful stuff working, augmenting my mouse/keyboard use. For example, a finger to the left minimises and two fingers to the right opens a list of recently used apps. Yet I'm very conscious that everything would just be better suited to a keyboard shortcut.. I never bothered with Touchless and mouse emulation things; years of 2D GUI design isn't suited to this kind of interface. "Midnight" is a my favourite Leap app but I think that's just an iPad app that lends itself very well to the leap input too.

seivan 13y ago

"Hey so LeapMotion is still being developed, I better hurry to write a blog post and complain about it before they improve it".

davedx 13y ago
If it's still being developed why is it on retail for $80? Most people make sure their product is useful and working before selling it to people. If you bought a car and the brakes mostly worked, would you be happy?
- ewang1 13y ago
  The hardware works. It's mostly lacking in the software side, which I presume will get better over time with 3rd party apps in the Leap App Store, and also when existing applications start implementing the functionality.
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  If the year was 1896, I probably would be happy. Brakes were far less functional and reliable in the first 20 years of the automobile's history.
chollida1 13y ago
> "Hey so LeapMotion is still being developed, I better hurry to write a blog post and complain about it before they improve it" If you take someone's money and give them a product they have every right to review it and point out both the good and bad points about your product. I thought the review was very fair, and I"ll be the folks at leap would to. They just got a bit of press and some tips on what one of their clients thinks is broken.

nairteashop 13y ago

I think the article is a bit unfair. I've been playing around with a leap for a few days and am suitably impressed. What works very well with the device is coarse movements, especially relative hand movements. What doesn't work so well is finer gestures (1/100th of a millimeter motions of all 10 fingers? ha). This app is a perfect example: https://airspace.leapmotion.com/apps/cyber-science-motion https://airspace.leapmotion.com/apps/cyber-science-motion You can use your hands, kept flat, to spin around / zoom a 3-D rendering of a human skull. You can also point at specific elements on the skull. Both of these coarse gestures work great, and the experience is incredible. However, the app also unfortunately has a "click" gesture to pick apart elements of the skull - you click by spreading out your thumb and then folding it back in. Works terribly, as this fine gesture is detected maybe 50% of the time. It should've simply been left out. I showed this app to my dad, who's a doctor, and he was blown away. He was visibly excited about the potential for a device he can use to spin around CT and MRI scans in the operating room without having to touch a mouse/joystick - currently he has a person doing this for him to keep things sterile, and this can sometimes be frustrating. The leap, at least in its current incarnation, reminds me a lot of Google glass. Both Google/LEAP and their proponents say the devices are going to change the world. Maybe, maybe not. Neither device works perfectly like what you see in the heavily edited demo videos. But both can be invaluable in certain specialized fields, today, as long as folks are realistic about what can be done with them.

Keyframe 13y ago
What's the lag like?
- nairteashop 13y ago
  Not noticeable at all (I'm testing on a 2 yr old Macbook Pro).
  - Keyframe 13y ago
    I think I have a use for this if their SDK is good. I'll check it out. Thanks!
  - 13y ago

nine_k 13y ago

If all you do is browse the web, a touchpad is often all you need. For text editing / word processing, a good keyboard is often all what's needed, and the use of mouse is often discouraged by gurus. I still can easily imagine using the Leap Motion device while editing images and especially 3D models. Even more I can imagine using it in games, especially games written with this device in mind. I don't own the device but I tried it. What's great is that you don't need to wave your hands in the air, Minority report-style; moving your fingers us enough. I wish it was built into a keyboard; it would replace a touchpad / trackpoint easily, adding much more capabilities. BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992?

nairteashop 13y ago
> I wish it was built into a keyboard This may very well happen if the Leap takes off. They already have distribution deals with HP and Asus; the next logical step would be building it into the laptop. Should be quite possible since the device is small and relatively cheap.
vanderZwan 13y ago
> BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992? I came here to state this. I'm studying interaction design, while I understand the author's frustrations, the problems do largely seem to be to be poor interface design for how to use the data the leap collects about your hand (and the visualiser demonstrates how accurate that data is). Basically, the current basic demos try to mimick a mouse by way of using extremely clunky gestures. That won't work: for this to take off, the interface needs to be designed from the start with gestures in mind. I have some ideas on how to do that, but it will require some further tinkering and testing. The sensor itself is amazing and in my experience very reliable - although I might be biased after having tried to design gesture based interfaces with the Kinect and not succeeding due to its technical limitations and unreliability.
kabdib 13y ago
Mice worked pretty well in 1992. They worked well in 1984 on the Mac, and five years before that, on Xerox hardware and LMs (though they suffered from "really small ball bearing" disease, and easily got dirty or cranky and refused to roll well). With a mouse, you have at least one button you can signal an event with. Imagine doing a UI where you didn't have a mouse button. All you can do is move and point. That's a Kinect, for the most part. I haven't used a LeapMotion, but I suspect it's the same problem; there's no way to generate a discrete event. It's all fuzzy. Did your fingers touch? Did you wave in a particular way? Some fuzzy matcher is pumping out "90% probability of event X, 75% probability of event Y" every few milliseconds, and it's up to higher layers to turn this goo into decisions that people are happy with. It's hard at all layers. I really think you need a button, a clicker. Something "hard" in the UI that slams a voice of reason into that fuzzy tower that's continually only able to /guess/ what you're trying to do. [We wanted a clicker on Kinect. Politically impossible. I think it would have helped a lot.]

mattdanger 13y ago

I played with a LeapMotion last week and was impressed by it but within 5 minutes my arm was tired.

chiph 13y ago
The local BestBuy had one set up & I played with it for a few minutes. Really Interesting, but not all that applicable to how I use a computer on a daily basis. I think it's greatest potential will be in gaming. Imagine casting a spell by using the appropriate arcane hand gestures. Or swinging a sword - it can tell the difference between an overhand and a side cut, and a blocking move.
- gdulli 13y ago
  > I think it's greatest potential will be in gaming. Imagine casting a spell by using the appropriate arcane hand gestures. Or swinging a sword - it can tell the difference between an overhand and a side cut, and a blocking move. I've had a Wii, and a Kinect, and gesturing as input got annoying very quickly with both. It's something that just sounds fun, but isn't. Even with the Nintendo DS, when you'd use a stylus to trace a certain shape to trigger an action, it didn't translate well to sustained gameplay. Though it remained workable longer than with Wii/Kinect gaming. Simple swipes with a stylus or finger (on a screen) continue to work well, whereas even simple arm or hand gestures quickly become annoying and fatiguing. It turns out that pressing buttons works just fine, and is actually ideal, even if other input methods sound sexier.
alan_cx 13y ago
Your comment reminds me of something pointed out during a boxing match many moons ago. Which was essentially a comment about how hard it actually is to simply hold up one's arms and fists over quite small periods of time, let alone constantly move them around, then start punching. Its actually quite draining. Current input schemes involve a lot of support of the hands and arms. This waving hands around in the air offers no physical support. So, I think that its use will be limited to a subset of tasks, where it will be revolutionary, but much harder to integrate in to general use. Simply because of fatigue.

vermontdevil 13y ago

Four students at RIT are using this to develop a sign to text app. http://motionsavvy.com/ http://motionsavvy.com/ So it does have potential/use.

rpwilcox 13y ago
Fascinating. What's annoying about computer/video based sign instructions is the lack of feedback. "Did I get this sign right or do I just think I have it right?" If MotionSavvy can notify me when I get it wrong, very nice!

nwh 13y ago

Is all writing seriously boiling down to animated GIFs of "reactions"?

simias 13y ago
I had the same reaction after seeing the first two gifs but the rest are mostly demonstrative and to the point. On a side note, it's still quite amazing that gifs are still the simplest way to show short video clips on the web.
- nwh 13y ago
  They're really not. Embedded video is a fraction of the size, and faster to render to boot.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    Is that true? What kind of encoding are we talking about?
    - nwh 13y ago
      https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/ was on the front page a day or so ago, it grabs GIFs and re-encodes them into video (MP4 and OGGv). The results are much smaller and, in my local experimentation, are much, much faster to render than the original files. There's some technical details at https://mediacru.sh/demo https://mediacru.sh/demo . Draw your own conclusions, but that's how I have experienced it.
      - jodrellblank 13y ago
        The gif loaded and played seamlessly. The video was a placeholder which loaded a full screen QuickTime window that delayed for 5-10 seconds then played. Claim "gifs are still the simplest way to show short video clips on the web." agreed.

mbesto 13y ago

There's a general assumption that the Minority Report interface is the interface of the future.[0] There are few reasons why I'm saying no. 1. First and foremost, gorilla arm.[1] My presumption with the "interface of the future" is that it's needed for prolonged use. So, first thing's first, the interface can't be one where our arms require our hands to be higher than our elbows. Unless of course our species got a whole lot stronger in the forearm to support such a feature. Don't see our species doing that anytime soon. 2. Feedback - Right now the feedback loop is eye->brain->hand->brain->eye (repeat) where the hand's pressure against a solid surface is the most important feedback response. With the minority report style interface we currently have a massive delay (comparatively speaking) between the brain->hand->brain loop. We also have to iterate the whole loop much more because we need to constantly assess with our eye where our hand is in 3D (not digital) space. Now let's say the technology gets much better and reduces this to 5ms. We are now bound by the differences of our synapses firing between touch and light. I could be wrong, but it's my assumption that due to the speed of light being the way that it is, that "touch" will always beat "sight" in performance. For prolonged used applications my bet is on adaptive surfaces. For short term (turning an stove on, flicking a light switch, etc) interfaces I potentially see this Minority Report style interface happening. But does the benefit cost of innovation? Personally I think we are fooling ourselves. [0] - http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit... [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nairteashop 13y ago
I agree with you that a Minority Report style interface doesn't make sense as the sole interface to a PC. However, something like the Leap IMO makes a great secondary interface to a keyboard and mouse/trackpad. I'm using a Leap controller right now, with BTT for Mac/Touchless for gesture-based control. As I read through a page I can simply stick my hand out and wave it up to scroll down the page - it's a phenomenal experience for passive reading as I don't have to break focus to reach out for my mouse/trackpad. I've also configured some additional coarse gestures to launch mission control etc. Using the Leap for such brief, coarse gestures avoids both the problems you've mentioned because my arm is resting on my desk, with fingers just a few inches above my trackpad/keyboard, so no "gorilla arm" problems; the gestures are coarse, requiring very little hand-eye co-ordination and finally, the gestures are brief so no fatigue problems. All of this breaks down once you start trying to do any finer-control gestures, like trying to point at links and click on them like the OP tried to do. IMO the Leap should be used to augment the keyboard/mouse as a secondary interaction interface that you use occasionally.

tsenkov 13y ago

Disclaimer: I haven't tried Leap Motion, yet. Did I get this right? Leap Motion vs. Kinect: - LM is smaller (significantly); - LM is cheaper (significantly); - LM is more accurate (significantly); - LM has almost no real apps (mostly concept demos). If these are all correct I find Scott's post nothing more than a "normal", "the competition sucks, too", Microsoft type of post.

AndrewDucker 13y ago
Very different markets. The LM is very short range, so you couldn't use it like a Kinect. And you wouldn't plug a Kinect into your PC to watch your fingers move either.

utopkara 13y ago

I find Leap Motion quite accurate. You will quickly get used to the convenience of gestures with BetterTouchTool, and wish you had it on computers which don't have Leap Motion. Otherwise, The gestures used by apps is something that needs to be carefully crafted. For instance Touchless, the mouse replacement, simply doesn't cut it; you'll find yourself reaching out for the mouse/trackball/trackpad within the first 10 seconds. The leap gets effected by strong light sources on the ceiling. You might want to use it facing downwards if that is an issue. Also, if you are wearing a watch or a ring, it might get confused with the reflection.

hoffcoder 13y ago

I think that the newer Kinect 2.0 will be able to take care of all these more sophisticated gestures. When compared to the Leapmotion it has much better range and its accuracy will improve now too.

iekadou 13y ago

Leap Motion – Just a toy or the future? - http://tech.particulate.me/ http://tech.particulate.me/

nsxwolf 13y ago

It's obviously not a replacement for a mouse and keyboard and never will be. I could see some useful gesture based macros, like "throw your hands up in total frustration" to rage-quit an app or open a distraction-free full screen editor.

zero_intp 13y ago

I think a ring to click might be the best answer. Clicking (for me) works better with a tactile response.

mrbill 13y ago

This is exactly my experience with the Leap unit; I played with it for a couple of days. Then uninstalled all the drivers and put it back in the box, will try again in a few months to see if things have improved.

bennyg 13y ago

A coworker and I have written some gesture recognizers for Leap in C# and Objective-C hoping to make the thing more usable and easier for other developers to write software using it. Hate to do a shameless plug, but both can be found here: https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-ObjC https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-ObjC https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-CSharp https://github.com/uacaps/MotionGestureRecognizers-CSharp --- We're hoping to start the community foundation for making tools that help make Leap extremely usable from both a development and from a user experience standpoint. The Leap is awesome, beautiful and we think can be used in a myriad of applications.

colmvp 13y ago

Well jeez, let's not even bother then. Wendell, shut off the generator, Scott thinks we're useless.

jdietrich 13y ago

Believe it or not, this is a century-old problem. The theremin is an electronic musical instrument, played by waving your hands in the air. It works by detecting RF capacitance between a pair of antennae and the player's body. You can see the Theremin being played at the YouTube link below. Playing the theremin is incredibly difficult, due to the lack of tactile feedback. The human body is very poorly equipped to point precisely at an arbitrary position in free space. Only a handful of players can achieve anything better than squeaky science fiction noises and even virtuoso players struggle constantly with intonation. Modern theremin technique depends on a system of discrete hand gestures, which reduce the player's dependency upon coarse proprioception. If the Leap Motion is to have any real utility, it will need phenomenally sophisticated software, to interpret intent from hand motion rather than simply passing the hand location as a raw input. The human body simply isn't capable of making the kind of movements that the designers of Leap Motion seem to expect, even with a great deal of practice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq_N-gjEpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq_N-gjEpI

lifeformed 13y ago
I wonder if you could add some tactile feedback with some precision fans? A grid of fans below your hand and in front of it could provide a gradient of subtle pressure. Or maybe a fan on some sensitive servos that track each fingertip?
- vilya 13y ago
  That's pretty much exactly the idea behind the "Aireal" project from Disney Research: http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/aireal/ http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/aireal/
lcedp 13y ago
Thank you for insight. Really interesting. But popular sci-fi movies features like waving hands in the air / parallel to the floor touch screens // transparent monochrome screens(not HUDs) just seem so obviously wrong to me and I don't understand why so many people fail to see it.
13y ago

nikunjk 13y ago

Touchless sucks on AirSpace. Try BetterTouchTool. The gesture tracking and usability of that App is incredible.

deanclatworthy 13y ago

I've been experimenting with the LeapMotion at work today, and some initial observations: - There's no apps yet that have made me go wow. - The range is quite small - The motion of hovering an arm in front of you is extremely tiring after more than 10-15minutes. Try holding your arm out in front of you for that long without moving and you'll see why. The reason Kinect was a success is that you can take real-world activities such as dancing, jumping over obstacles, jogging (on the spot), and translate them into an interactive digital version. With the Leap, I've yet to think of a real world scenario where I would be waving my hands in front of my chest, that would translate well into a digital experience. Conducting an orchestra would be one good application for this, perhaps training conductors, but I couldn't think of anything else.

imroot 13y ago

I did some investigative work to look at if we could use the leap motions to replace the touch-sensitive overlays that we strap to 60" TV's for our on-air traffic folks to use during their segments -- the overlays run about 2500, and if we could replace them with a leap motion and get the same functionality with less cost, this could allow us to roll out the traffic application to more stations than the six or so that are currently using our in-house traffic application. The first thing that I noticed was that it couldn't take the range of the 60" television that we had hooked up to the traffic software, so I scaled this down to a Thunderbolt display, and tried again. In my tests, the recognition for the thumb was sporadic, if not completely missing -- in both my (fat guy) test as well as during the testing of the local personality (non-fat guy). I then made some changes to our software to try to minimize the effects of the natural movements of the hand -- I turned down the sensitivity to attempt to compensate for the normal shakes and jitters that you have with your hands. This gave it a better feel, but, the traffic reporters still missed the feeling of touching the display and watching that display interact with your touch. They're still neat devices (I really wanted to say neat toys, but, I don't want to cheapen the work that the Leap Motion folks put into this thing), but, I'm having a hard time implementing them in a way that would work for us...so they're sitting on my shelf, waiting for a project that could use them (or, take them to my local hackerspace should I not find a good project for them shortly)...

rhema 13y ago

The biggest problem with the leap that I have seen (there is one in my lab) is that it sees hands spread out evenly on the surface really well, and that's about it. If you do a thumbs up gesture (or a rude gesture when it doesn't work), the fingers get occluded by the bottom of your hand. Think about you hands as five friends trying to play connect at the same time and you can imagine the kinds of occlusion problems you might face. Still, I, and probably others, like the leap. It's not useless. You just have to exploit it the right way, looking for natural interface design beyond a Tom Cruse movie. The biggest free air interaction problems are (1) making visible what the available gestures are, and (2) providing tangible or visible feedback. You don't get to see and feel the the interaction like you can with a keyboard or less digitally inclined tools.

lnanek2 13y ago
Maybe camera is just the way to go then. There's Kinect, of course, but Intel is getting into the act as well: http://click.intel.com/intelsdk/Intel_Developer_Kit-0-C92.aspx http://click.intel.com/intelsdk/Intel_Developer_Kit-0-C92.as... Video demos here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-computing-sdk http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-co...

JamesCRR 13y ago

Nice example of someone adding a leap motion controller to their site, GoSquared: https://www.gosquared.com/blog/playing-around-with-the-new-leap-motion-controller-on-the-web https://www.gosquared.com/blog/playing-around-with-the-new-l... I'm not going to argue this demonstrates utility, but it does show some good recognition of smaller gestures.

wesley 13y ago

Looks like a much better alternative just revealed itself: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haptix/haptix-multitouch-reinvented http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haptix/haptix-multitouch...

nicenemo 13y ago

Can it be that I saw a prototype at ICT Delta conference may 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands?

egypturnash 13y ago

I've got my Leap doing what I bought it for: controlling iTunes when my hands are covered in hair dye. [1] If I can get it to do more, awesome. But that's enough for now. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O6sR0PKofc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O6sR0PKofc

Domenic_S 13y ago
Then you got ripped off! https://flutterapp.com/ https://flutterapp.com/
- egypturnash 13y ago
  When it's at my desk, my laptop is connected to an external monitor and keyboard; it runs closed. Flutter is of no use to me.
  - Domenic_S 13y ago
    Why does it run closed? It doesn't have to.
    - egypturnash 13y ago
      Short answer: I like it that way. Long answer: When it's plugged into the external monitor/keyboard/wacom tablet/leap/etc, the laptop is on a shelf beneath the main desk surface. It's completely out of view when I'm standing there working. I've got a 24" monitor on an adjustable arm; I don't need a second screen. Or want one; if I have two screens next to each other I inevitably go crazy if they're not exactly the same color profile. (Photo of my setup: http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/08/desk-porn.jpg http://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/08/desk...)

mdaniel 13y ago

I also have one, and after seeing what it sees during the orientation I wondered how many of its problems could be cured by having a second sensor that one could position about a foot away from the other to give the Leap stereo vision. I am speaking totally out of school because I don't know if that would create more problems than it solves, though. On my phone, to apologies if this is a duplicate of another thread.

pbreit 13y ago

I think the "useless" comment misses that its sweet spot utility is unknown at this point. And I'm not sure "general purpose computer input device" is going to be such a sweet spot. The precision "problem" can obviously be addressed with software. That said, I do believe the absence of killer utility is a problem for Leap right now since it came out with a decent bang and now the less than favorable reviews are dripping in. I think they would have done themselves a significant favor by having a killer app ready from the outset. I also think they need to encourage people to look beyond simple human-computer interaction. Apparently these things could map a whole football game or count the number of people at a concert. Things like that. I also think the commercial angles will be better for business.

lvs 13y ago
The onus was on the company to figure out what its "sweet spot utility" was before launch, don't you think?
- pbreit 13y ago
  Yep: "I think they would have done themselves a significant favor by having a killer app ready from the outset."
  - lvs 13y ago
    Sorry -- yes, chiming in with agreement.

JabavuAdams 13y ago

Question: does the LEAP need to be flat on the table, or could you hang it around your neck to get mobile gesture input in a vertical plane?

sytelus 13y ago

What surprised me after little digging up was that Leap Motion does not support point cloud. That means you can't get 3D world as points in space from Leap Motion. Their founders says Leap Motion isn't designed for this purpose. This means you can't use Leap Motion for applications such as 3D scanning. Personally I think that would be much more exciting then ability to move windows by waving.