Leap Motion Releasing Next Week

I was lucky enough to receive a devkit, so I've been making concept demos for it since then.




You can find tons more on my channel.

It is great in combination with the Rift - it is not for every genre, but for some it works just fine.
My title LICHT will support the Rift, but the Rift version will be a bit delayed, so it will not be available on launch.
Just a few more screws I want to get a bit tighter to have a really round experience.

And I plan to create man more Rift compatible games in the future. The next title won't be, but the 3 after that are all planed with Rift support (but not exclusively for the Rift, even though I would love to make a game like that).

Currently I am in the process of finishing up a review roundup on all the Leap games that have been in the beta (man that was some work), so I will post you a link of what to expect when it launches here soon.

for those interested - here a complete roundup of pretty much every launch title for pc of the leap motion: http://indienerds.com/wordpress/?p=2487

You can try this to make it mobile : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVopcoxizcY

It seems that leap's tracking range is not big enough for FPS games

FPS is an unusable genre for the Leap - think about strategy or puzzle games. They might not be the most obvious VR games, but they actually can be really cool in VR and there are large groups of players for these genres too. ;)

I had received one as well, maybe a week ago or so and like one or two people above me I was surprised by the lack of immediate demos/applications available for a specific platform (Mac, Win, etc. altogether there was a decent number I guess but there appear to be many platform exclusives)

I had hoped there would be an easy way to use two at a time. The range is a bit limited...

Someone connect it to the arm of their chair and see what it's like using it from there :P - I'll probably make something for it later but with the really limited range it's a bit disheartening :/

I love the idea of the Leap, but I think the future with finger controllers lies with haptic feedback vr solutions.
I'd like to use it for a cockpit flight-sim or space-sim setup, or indeed 3d modeling (not sure if Modo supports it yet)
But I think it's hard enough to gauge the distance of my fingers to the cockpit buttons just using the depth perception.
Feeling the finger touching something is going to be paramount for future hand-finger controllers.

Man, I just received my leap controller after a year long wait.

What a buzz-kill.
Crappy tracking, not comfortable to use for more than 10 minutes, and a real lack-luster collection of gimicky apps.

With that said, the integration with Maya looks absolutely incredible- and I pray for more 3D package support.

Well, I'm also really disappointed. It seems like one of the more average hand tracking solutions with good latency and small device size.
Only if you put your open hand horizontal to the device it actually recognizes all your fingers. Any other pose you do with your hand, it immediatly looses tracking of some fingers. Also, the range with good precision is very very limited.

I'm the developer of a launch application on Leap Motion's Airspace app store (Molecules, a Mac-based molecular viewer that I'm currently adding Rift support to), so I can provide another perspective on the device. I've had access to one as a developer for a few months, and I still think there's good potential for the Leap Motion controller as an input device to the Rift.

One of the biggest problems I see early on with this device is the attempt to port 2-D input methods to it, rather than exploiting the 3-D nature of the input. For example, many of the first applications on the store are ports of touchscreen-based games, and pointing and gestures for those were simply converted to the equivalent input with the Leap. This doesn't really give you anything that you didn't already have with the touchscreen, and you lose the limited tactile feedback you had with that earlier input method.

I did this same thing with my application, and wasn't really happy with it until I sat down and reworked the interactions to take advantage of the Z input you receive alongside the X and Y. I mapped scaling of a 3-D model to the Z movement of a hand, and rotation to the X and Y. When combined with two hands for translation of a model, I've found this to be superior in many ways to mouse or touchscreen-based input, and it allows me to navigate a structure in fewer actions than those 2-D input methods. I also believe that when I get Rift support operational, it will provide a great means of interacting with these models in 3-D space.

I did recently create a drop-in view for Apple's Scene Kit framework (a Mac-based framework for quick construction of 3-D scenes) as an open source project:

https://github.com/BradLarson/OculusRiftSceneKit

and one of my sample applications in there uses Leap Motion input to move two crude representations of hands that cast their own light source:




I'm still excited about the integration of the Oculus Rift with Leap Motion, because the Leap still delivers the best 3-D hand and finger tracking fidelity I've seen (I've tested a few of the different depth cameras out there). It also has a very well written SDK, and the reliability of hand and finger tracking has increases significantly over time with their software updates. I think a lot of people have been trying to use it for something it's not well suited for, like a mouse replacement.