Leap Motion: Three Dimensional Gesture Control

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428350/the-most-important-new-technology-since-the/

by wavesound • 14 years ago

49 12 14 years ago

technologyreview.com

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

We've talked about this quite a lot here on HN[1, 2, 3, 4]. It is a cool technology nonetheless.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002418

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4029524

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4008520

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4007083

JackC2• 14 years ago

All of those are to leapmotion.com, though. It's exciting to see a third party saying, "yes, it really is that good."

Because if this really is that good, and that cheap, they've crossed a fundamental line. We're looking at a hardware accessory that has a good chance of being as ubiquitous, and maybe even as revolutionary, as the mouse.

aeurielesn• 14 years ago

I'm still waiting for the kind of interfaces used in Ironman 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KPhqy7ZwHU

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

Then you will like this likely component of such a system: http://www.ultrasonic-audio.com/products/syntact.html

unwind• 14 years ago

It would be neat for tech like this to "revolutionize" TV remotes. TV:s continue to grow more and more complex, and it's also something you interact with semi-seldom, in bursts, as opposed to computers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22).

dsirijus• 14 years ago

This should replace trackpads. As, in every laptop out there.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

Looks cool; has high resolution but what about accuracy? I didn't actually see him touch anything in particular, just wave around and create lots of swoops. Can you select an individual item from one of those swarms?

Also, exhausting. Waving your arms all day, just to scroll. Still its coarse motor control instead of fine motor, which is less tedious.

JackC2• 14 years ago

Also, exhausting. Waving your arms all day, just to scroll. Still its coarse motor control instead of fine motor, which is less tedious.

Yeah, I'd be shocked if this replaces the scroll wheel. I can see a few ways it might complement existing input devices, though. One is for maybe a dozen intuitive, system-wide shortcuts. Like "if I stick out two fingers and twitch to the right within six inches of the screen, and I'm not in a touch-enabled app, switch to the next song." (This takes too long to say -- try doing it.) Or, "if I make the classic 'stop' hand gesture within six inches of the screen, stop playing music." This may not sound like much, but imagine a random non-geeky user is playing music in the background and gets a phone call and wants to pause. I bet 25% or less of users use a system-wide shortcut for that. I bet 75% or more would intuitively remember and use the "stop" gesture if you showed it to them once.

A second use case is collaboration. Someone comes into my office and I turn my screen around and show them a map of a given facility we're working on. (This happens a couple times a week.) They want to zoom out a little and see what's to the west of the facility. Instead of asking me to do that, they just reach in and do it with gestures. They don't think about it, it just works.

The third use case is all those things we do with our hands in real life that there's no analog for on the computer. Like, say, oil painting. Or conducting. Or playing rock-paper-scissors. Or air guitar. Or juggling. Or ping pong. There are a million things we do that involve holding something in the air and using it to cause some effect on the world, with little or no direct physical feedback. There are a million more that we haven't thought of yet because they're not physically possible (but they will be virtually possible).

I'm pretty excited about this.

pbreit• 14 years ago

Yep, complaining that this is a bad replacement for the scroll wheel is missing the point entirely.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

I think that 3D modeling is where this will shine. Imagine something like SketchUp with gestures. Manipulating 3D objects with a mouse is very tedious.

spyder• 14 years ago

I agree with others who are saying that waving your arm can quickly become tiring, but maybe you could point this device on a table so you could rest your hand on the table (or surface of the laptop) like using a mouse and only your index finger would be in the air. I think that way it would be less tiring.

FrojoS• 14 years ago

So, despite having spend some time surfing the web, mostly right after the device was announced, I still don't know how the Leap Motion works. I realize, that this is proprietary technology so it might be simply unknown. Still, from a magazine like TR I would expect to hear at least an educated guesses.

They link to a different article [1] which apparently got a demo from one of the founders. They claim, that the Leap uses VGA camera sensors but then they talk about a force field - whatever that is supposed to mean in this context. [...] Leap's device tracks all movement inside its force field [...]

Earlier, I heard some crude speculations about electro magnetic sensing and a mathematical breakthrough, that lead to the foundation of the company. But I have no idea what to think of them. A quick search on google scholar about the the two founders didn't reveal anything so far, either.

There is a Quora thread [2] on the topic, where someone, without any further comment linked to a 2012 Microsoft Research paper [3] with the title SoundWave: Using the Doppler Effect to Sense Gestures.

My assumption would have been, that they do indeed use optical cameras only. By using a bunch of them, combined with different angles and positions as well as a very limited workspace, they are able to increase the accuracy when compared to the Kinect. Do we have any hint on whether or not they project an infrared grid like the Kinect does?

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/26/3118592/leap-motion-gestur... [2] http://www.quora.com/Leap-Motion/Does-the-Leap-product-work-... [3] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/pu...

Leap Motion: Three Dimensional Gesture Control

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