3 ms·
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 s
by 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.]
- rywang 13y agoActually, it's quite possible to build a "clicker" on the Kinect. It involves mounting the sensor from above, and building completely different software that tracks the hands and fingers well. We've done it: http://threegear.com http://threegear.com Here's a video of tracking arbitrary hand motion using a Kinect-equivalent sensor: http://youtu.be/exZ6wukQCpk http://youtu.be/exZ6wukQCpk
- jfoutz 13y agoI think he was calling out the microsoft politics as limiting the functionality of the kinect, not technical expertise.
- clarky07 13y agovideo of hands (fingers) doesn't seem like the hard part here though (relatively speaking, I'm sure it's plenty hard). The hard part is recognizing the input the user wants. Tracking the finger is easy. Figuring out when that finger motion is a click is the hard part. The video on your website is significantly more impressive than the linked youtube video. That being said, I still didn't see any "clicking". Perhaps I missed it.
- nine_k 13y agoNote how I mentioned PCs of 1992, already the majority platform that still sucked with this regard. (On Douglas Engelbart's computer mice worked impressively well in 1968.) Take a look at a typical laptop; its trackpad also can't seem to generate click events. Still people tap on it and happily ignore hardware buttons (if they're present at all). Same applies to the wildly popular touch screens. Despite the fact that the finger's projection on a touch surface is large and fuzzy, it allows for rather fine motions. Same thing is with Leap Motion (and probably Kinect): you can define a 'click zone' on a hard surface, like your desk or screen, or tap your fingers one against another. You instantly have 8-10 'mouse buttons'. Finger touch is pretty well-defined: not only positions but velocities of the fingers change in a discernible pattern.