![]() Other times you’ll wonder why your article-closing hand wave isn’t being picked up by the controller. Sometimes you’ll send the queue racing off in the wrong direction. It takes practice to get the hang of it, and even once you do, the experience is halting. ![]() The app shows one row of articles and a few simple gestures for selecting and scrolling through them. Take the clean, simple New York Times app for Leap. The effort it takes to make an app decipher your 3-D movements can make some tasks more difficult, not less. It’s also fun for zipping through the universe in your own private planetarium using the Exoplanet app. This is best demonstrated in creative apps that help users make music or art. When you are in the zone in an app – having mastered where your hands need to be and how much movement is just enough – the tracking can be incredibly accurate and the results impressive. Leap suggests using the device with your elbows propped on the desk. Keeping your arms and hands very still – a requirement in many programs to select something on the screen – is harder and more tiring than it looks. In the app Frog Dissection, pinning a virtual amphibian to a table to dissect it requires a steady hand. This is great for when you want to make small precise movements, but maddeningly finicky when you’re just trying to do something simple like select a button. The Leap sensors are extremely sensitive. If a hand is too vertical, the sensors can’t pick out individual fingers. The Leap works best when your hands are parallel to the desk. Apps include instructions, but getting the feel for each one takes time. Scrolling might be a forward circular motion with a single finger in one app, and left to right in another. Gestures are not unified across all apps. Using the Leap to navigate this added dimension has its challenges. It recognizes your unique hand shape and uses it as a password. Windows users can install Unlock, which lets you unlock your computer by waving your hand above the controller. Most are platform agnostic, but about 30% are only for Windows or Mac. There are a few professional apps, lots of casual games, tools for learning a new instrument like a harp or piano, and educational programs. To buy new apps, you are taken to the Web-based Airspace store where they are sorted by category or platform. The Leap Motion apps are cordoned off in their own launch application, called Airspace. Leap has been working with developers to create apps specifically for the controller. “The mouse can only be clicking or not clicking.” He says the Leap controller can tap into a new way of working with applications that is richer than existing methods, but will never be a more efficient way to do certain tasks, like enter data into a spreadsheet. ![]() “Our philosophy is not that the Leap is intended to replace the mouse and keyboard,” said Michael Buckwald, Leap’s co-founder and CEO. The device isn’t just a another way to nudge a cursor around or input data. The half-inch-high and 3-inch-long rectangle is also impressively light, weighing in at a tenth of a pound. The Mac- and Windows-compatible controller plugs into a USB port and is remarkably small – close in size to a pack of gum. Its sensors can pick up movement as far as 2 feet up in the air and 2 feet out from each side of the device, creating an invisible oblong field for moving your hands around. Optimally, the Leap controller sits about an inch in front of the keyboard, lined up with the middle of the computer screen. Leap says its technology can track precise movements to within one-hundredth of a millimeter. The Leap Motion controller follows in the footsteps of the Microsoft Kinect.īut where the Kinect tracks large movements for the entire body, the Leap is meant for small, subtle hand movements made close to the screen. Motion-detection sensors are presumed to be the next big input device for computers, complementing existing input technology like the mouse, keyboard, touchscreen and voice control. (Full disclosure: Last month we named Leap Motion as one of our 10 startups to watch for 2013.) Here are our impressions: The device will go on sale at Best Buy on July 28.ĬNN tested out the new controller to get a taste of this touch-free future. The screen is still two-dimensional for now, but fingers and hands are free to poke, grab and flick in 3-D to move through applications. The new Leap Motion controller, which starts shipping preorders Monday and costs $80, is the first commercial gadget that will bring some of that Hollywood magic to laptops and desktops. In movies like “Iron Man” and “Minority Report,” characters reach out and move virtual objects around in midair with their hands, sending windows and images sailing through 3-D space without touching a keyboard or controller. How do you imagine the computer of the future?
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