I've just been testing this out.<p>It works.<p>Not perfectly, for me, so far - it's a little wobbly, and I heartily recommend clearing your desk before beginning. With a headset-mounted Leap the close distance isn't particularly close, and it DOES work fine at arm's length. Unless what's sitting at arm's length is an expensive condenser mic, in which case you will a) fail to grab the block you're reaching for and b) punch your microphone.<p>Also, calibration is about as much fun as it is with most optical devices. For anyone who has never had that particular joy - it's not much fun. Tip if you're doing this - <i>rotate</i> the Leap, don't just move it around. Also, I had to iterate through about three allegedly reflective surfaces to get one that worked - ironically enough I ended up using the screen of my Surface Pro.<p>But it's orders of magnitude better than the last time I tried the Leap, and I suspect with a darker room it'd work even better. No latency I could feel, and I could throw blocks around and build towers in VR fine.<p>Very impressed indeed.<p>This evening I'm going to give it another go once the irritatingly persistent IR emitter in the sky goes away, and I'll also be trying their Warlock Battle game, which looks like lots of fun...
While it's very neat to see these Johnny-Mnemonic style demos, what I'd really like is a realistic replacement for Apple's Magic Trackpad. I'd buy one if it were able to replace my trackpad on an ordinary desktop environment. I don't need to manipulate cubes in 3d space (who does?!) outside of video games. But I'd love to replace my flat trackpad with a skeletal gesture motion-tracker for more mundane tasks.
Glad to see they improved the software. Here's a video someone uploaded <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhBaY1UMOJs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhBaY1UMOJs</a>
I'm interested in ways devices like this could be used for everyday work, automate some IDE task / editor macros. Subtle Gestures could add another dimension to data input without leaving the keyboard.
There was a slightly worrying bit of latency visible here:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/rnlCGw-0R8g?t=32" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rnlCGw-0R8g?t=32</a>
A while back (maybe a year or so) I played with the early alpha/beta support for the whole "stick your Leap on the front of your Rift" thing. It was really cool and seemed like something I'd expect to see in future VR headsets.<p>I'll have to check out this new software since it seems they've continued to develop it.
What is happening on the Augmented Reality technology that Leap was originally showing?<p>I am much more interested in Augmented then Virtual and was hoping to see Leap move more in that area. I haven't seen anything since July 2015.
The demo shows intricate and precise hand and finger joint tracking, seemingly knowing precisely how both hands are positioned in a small volume of space. Maybe we may soon finally be able to push past the current non-vocal computer input speed barrier imposed by physically typing on a keyboard. The spoken word is roughly around 225wpm[1], while few can claim accurate typing speeds of more than 150wpm for extended periods of time.<p>Example of smaller motor movements that can be performed are finger twitches or trilling piano keys.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Stenotype" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Stenotype</a>