The Leap Motion Controller Now Supports Linux

http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2013/03/the-leap-motion-controller-now-supports.html

by onosendai • 13 years ago

124 39 13 years ago

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

Specifically Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 12.10, or newer; the SDK is distributed as a .deb file

141132• 13 years ago

Also, specifically Ubuntu - it depends on a higher version of libc6 than is available in everything up to and including unstable in Debian repositories, it's only available in experimental.

voltagex_• 13 years ago

Also known as Steam syndrome.

Does this trend worry anyone else? Limiting usage to one distro can't be a good thing.

trtg3• 13 years ago

I got it working just fine on gentoo, see the walkthrough here: http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-li...

wasn't that hard.

zmanian• 13 years ago

Triggered a preorder...

Without a doubt I'm going to use a product less if I have to boot into Windows...

Kiro• 13 years ago

It's comments like this that reminds me why I would never use Linux on my desktop.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

Because you'll like it so much that you won't want to boot to an OS you like less to use some stuff?

I guess that makes sense, it's also why I don't go to the amazing restaurant nearby but go to the shitty one. Only the shitty restaurant has tacos, and sometimes I want tacos.

mindstab• 13 years ago

D: huh, kinda looks cool but I think I'd get tired of holding my hands up all day :P

D: s'what keyboards, palm rests and elbow rests are for

S: yeah, i hear you

S: i played around with it for about 20 minutes and my arm was aching

So yeah. this is me being skeptical

oscilloscope• 13 years ago

Mount the device at the end of an armrest.

tomsthumb• 13 years ago

Standing desks would be a nice alternative too. Avoid the chair and have the thing facing upwards instead of forward. You'd have to work out how to keep your body out of the picture (no pun... sorry, I can't lie). Then you're really avoiding compression of any sort of nerves, except maybe in your feet.

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

These are things I've come up against in writing apps for it.

If I can lean my elbow on something it's OK. If I have to keep my hands up for very long, not so much fun.

I've been trying to restrict the broader movements to less-common actions (mode changes, for example) and then use simpler, arm-on-table doable actions for other things.

felxh• 13 years ago

I hear ya. I imagine it more as an extra input device instead of the main one. Sort of like a remote control

skore• 13 years ago

You know what? A year ago, I would have shared the exact same scepticism.

Now, I have an infant daughter who likes nothing more than being carried around, which has exponentially increased the number of activities I do with one hand, standing up.

Being able to have a soundless controller that you don't need to pick up or fiddle around with in a way that disturbs a tiny human sleeping on your other arm sounds like absolute perfection.

tezza• 13 years ago

As the owner of a sizable 2.5 y/o I agree.

Also by the time you cary your Bundles of Love around day-to-day, your arm strength for this type of HCI goes up substantially.

3327• 13 years ago

I just went to the leap dev meetup in nyc, (i also dev for leap). My feeling is that its a great UI instrument, for UI focused applications. What do i mean by that? Well, think of museums, aquariums, jobs such as architecture, perhaps autocad. Jobs/tasks where it would be way more fun and efficient to do the action with your hands.

kanja• 13 years ago

FINALLY YES

rjdagost2• 13 years ago

Does anyone have any real-world experience using the Leap? It looks cool as hell but I'm hearing rumors that it doesn't work well in the presence of halogen / incandescent bulbs or direct sunlight. If I have to carefully control the lighting to be able to use it, that's a dealbreaker for me.

jblock• 13 years ago

It gets testy around walls.

My experience is that in a moderately-lit situation (or a low-lit one) the thing works pretty great.

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

A few times I've had to move stuff out of the way because it would trigger a false hand presence.

Lighting hasn't been an issue for me; I get assorted warning messages ("Bright light!" "Low light!") but it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in what I've been doing.

I tried shining a laser pointer on but it didn't do anything. That was disappointing. :)

etrautmann• 13 years ago

Yes, I have a dev kit and have played around with a it a bunch. I'm very impressed with the low latency and high framerate (~110 fps via usb 2, rumored to go higher for usb 3.0). Latency is unquantified but barely perceptible even when moving quite quickly.

The potential performance issue is with dropouts and interference. It's pretty easy to have detected fingers drop in and out, mostly due to fingers occluding each other. With a level of dynamics modeling/filtering built on top of the leap SDK, it may be possible to minimize the impact of dropouts.

overall, it does seem like a reasonable way to interact with a computer, especially for drawing or manipulating objects, etc.

I unfortunately can't post a video because we're building the leap into a trial clinical device at the moment and its out of my hands.

narcissus• 13 years ago

Clinical devices are an awesome idea for this... nice one! Having worked on systems in hospitals before, I couldn't believe the number of times users had to handrub etc. each time they went from handling our scanners back to the actual product they were working with.

Congratulations on an awesome way to remove that step.

mxfh• 13 years ago

had the same issues with the dev-kit, hope they implement some sort of a multi-device mode in the future which gets rid of these occlusions caused by having only one point of view to the scene (you can do only so much with modeling, but that would be a start). The interaction experience for actual hand-gestures is, due to these limitations (sweet-spot-size, occlusion and hand orientation) far from what could be considered intuitive. Single tip input with chopsticks is the only mode that works immediately as one would expect.

wyager• 13 years ago

These devices work surprisingly well. I have been fairly happy with its performance.

lvs• 13 years ago

Does anyone know why the Leap preorder page specifies a Phenom II or an i3/i5/i7 processor in the fine-print hardware requirements? Is it for a particular chip feature? Or is CPU overhead going to be a big issue?

simcop2387• 13 years ago

Possibly for sse3, which i think was first in phenom ii for amd. For intel its likely just listing everything but atom

TsiCClawOfLight• 13 years ago

but I have an Athlon II 640 which supports SSE -SSE4A?

They also said that CPU overhead would be low.

bbwharris• 13 years ago

Played with one at sxsw. Ordered it right there. It is as impressive as it looks.

yarrel2• 13 years ago

I'm going to ignore this until the protocol is reverse engineered and a Free Software driver is released.

trtg3• 13 years ago

Well, I guess if you're that much of a diehard, just check out this project instead: http://www.duo3d.com/ they're planning on fully opensourcing everything. If you're annoyed because of the apparent dependency on ubuntu, note that I got things working on gentoo without much issue: http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-li...

The Leap Motion Controller Now Supports Linux

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