Leap Motion - Is it supposed to be this jumpy?

By diagnostic tool, do you mean the calibration tool? Jumpiness is one symptom of miscalibration, so that's a good step to take. You may have better results with a mirror or other highly reflective surface.

We also have a full troubleshooting guide here: http://blog.leapmotion.com/troubleshooting-guide-vr-tracking/

The main things to look for:

• whether your system meets the recommended specs (Leap's own requirements are fairly low, but combined with the Rift, positional tracking camera, and graphics-heavy demos, resources can be eaten up pretty quickly on lower-tier systems)


• whether your framerate and processing times are optimal


• whether an object in the background might be interfering with hand tracking (are you really close to your desk?)

Let me know if this helps, or we can troubleshoot further :D

Thanks. In my case, I am just using the visualizer and seeing the hands' motion out of sync. Then there is jumpyness as my hand holds still. The calibration tool is what I was talking about. It gets up to 30 sometimes and then goes back to zero. I have not tried anything where the DK2 is also running as the standalone performance is not usable. Having your hand jump all over the place and not having your virtual fingers match your real ones is frustrating. I really wonder if I have a defective device as this seems like I have to baby it along way too much.

If the other potential causes are ruled out and it's still very jumpy after a successful recalibration -- or you can't recalibrate, even with a mirror -- it may well be a hardware issue. Have you tried a mirror or similar surface?

I will see if I can find a mirror and get back to you. I have been using my monitor, but it may not be reflective enough.

One other thing: if you're looking at the Visualizer, be sure to hit V once to bring up the top-down view. It's also worth noting that VR Intro works extremely well in assessing these types of issues -- after you calibrate, try it out and let me know how it goes.

Mine acted just like that until calibrated, and I had the same problem, that my monitor has very little reflective qualities, good for viewing, bad for Leap Calibration, but after mirror calibration everything was great! Also different lights seem to give off different amounts of IR, and while the leap calibrates for lighting conditions, some lights seem to give it a harder time. I would make sure its low light when calibrating, this worked for me. ;)

~B

So, I got a mirror and after about 3 or 4 minutes it finally reached 80%. The odd thing is how much CPU this thing eats! Yikes! How can this thing need 30% of my CPU to perform calibration? I am still seeing extreme jumpiness and unpredictable hand/fingers.

My hope, when I ordered, was that Leap's hand tracking "just worked". That I would be able to leverage a solid product and bring hands into my application. I really don't want my users to experience lag or incorrect hand/finger placement. What is odd is that I see videos by developers that show hands working perfectly, and then I see videos by users who are experiencing difficulty.

For example, here you see the developer video of the nails application:



Then here you see a user struggling to get the controller to behave:



EDIT: I had the wrong video in the 2nd slot before. Around 2:51, you can see that he is clearly using his pointer finger to click on the blue nails, but his middle finger is out instead. Then his hands keep disappearing when he tries to select the pink nails. Then his virtual pinky starts spazzing out.

The experience of the reviewer is what I experience with the Leap Motion Controller with every application I have tried.

Is there an ideal environment that we need to be in to make things work? Are some of us struggling with a defective device and thinking it is our own issue?

Like the Rift itself, VR tracking with the Leap Motion Controller is a developer beta, and there are known issues related to certain hand poses (as well as the potential for bandwidth throttling and background interference) that we're working on.

This is one of the main reasons that we're working on embedded prototype modules like Dragonfly -- not just because it provides advantages over the standalone peripheral, but also because an embedded and integrated solution allows for a much smoother user experience. In the meantime, we're iterating really rapidly to make VR tracking as fast and precise as possible.

If you send along a video of your experience with VR Intro, we can take a look and hopefully identify the cause of the issues resulting in less-than-optimal tracking. Can you also confirm the data FPS and processing time range indicated in the Visualizer?

I have not used VR Intro yet, as it crashes instantly. However, I have been getting the same types of issues with the Leap using the visualizer. What is interesting is that the Visualizer and Leap Service hover around a combined 32-40% of my CPU when my hands are in view. This then drops to 2-3% when my hands are out of view. The device FPS stays around 115 when hands are in view while data FPS seems to occasionally drop to 100FPS and then this figure climbs back up to 114/115.

I have tried different USB ports and this has led to some improvement. When the Leap Motion was plugged into the USB 3.0 slot adjacent to my DK2's IR tracker, it seemed to cause lots of conflicts within the Leap Visualizer.

Maybe my Leap Controller is defective. The Leap Motion site says that it should track to the 1/100th of a millimeter at 200FPS:
https://www.leapmotion.com/product

This is precisely about accuracy.
The Leap Motion Controller tracks all 10 fingers up to 1/100th of a millimeter. It's dramatically more sensitive than existing motion control technology. That's how you can draw or paint mini masterpieces inside a one-inch cube.

When you move, it moves.
The Leap Motion Controller can track your movements at a rate of over 200 frames per second. That’s how the action on your screen keeps up with your every move.