The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion – which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. “From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you’ll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that’s possible with multi-touch inputs – without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we’ll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X.” Quite cool.
I smacked my forehead and my browser immediately went to Fox News website.
arm will be tired after a while using it
on second thought, might be fantastic for 3D scupting
Anyone remember how Tony Stark re-design Ironman after he escaped from being kidnapped?
yeah! leap motion for controlling the 3D structure and Google Glass for showing the 3D view.
# sorry about english
I thought that was a movie… Are you telling me that was a documentary about Tony Stark?
Depends. If they do it right you should be able to find movements and positions that don’t stress you too much. It will suck for doing anything involving a good deal of typing.
If a well staffed department would use this it would look mighty silly.
At work I have an application that allows me to make iTunes perform some actions by making hand gestures and this alone generates many remarks.
lol I can imagine ” Sir, why is your hand acting so weird? ” xD
Yes, I look a mayor donkey if I wave my hand trying to impress a co-worker and the application doesn’t pick it up. :-S
I accidentally click links when trying to scroll with touch pad / touch screen all the time. I don’t think that gestures would make any difference.
Edited 2013-05-21 07:09 UTC
A wrong thing happening is better than nothing happening I guess.
When you do something and nothing happens you look silly. If you click the wrong link people probably won’t even notice.
Yeah, imagine what it could look like from behind you if you are trying to move a vertical slider up and down
This is one device that will give new experience to couch potatoes.
I personally think a huge Gorilla Glass touchscreen coupled with a BB gun would be a lot more fun. A true realization of point-and-shoot paradigm.
Edited 2013-05-21 10:45 UTC
Seems to be that you touch the air instead of the screen… you still have to hold our arm up in the air. Also form the videos it looks like you control a mouse pointer around the screen… I can imagine that that is difficult when trying to touch certain things, like trying to click a certain button amongst many other buttons
I was thinking about this already back when Leap Motion was first introduced and IMHO that’s exactly the wrong sort of interfacing to use this kind of tech. Some sort of actions where real 3-dimensionality is key would obviously be the right place for this, like e.g. with manipulating objects in all three dimensions, but also Leap Motion excels in situations where you need more than one point of interaction — the mouse can only ever interact with a single point at any given time, but the Leap Motion can seemingly interact with full ten points simultaneously, so any action that either requires such or that has been designed to be more fluent and faster to do with multiple points of action are the kinds of situations that Leap Motion excels in.
My guess is: cheaper for large screens than touch screens.
I can see that now the hardware has become cheap enough, we can start to try out all kinds of new interfaces.
Google and Apple have voice control for their mobile devices. There is Google glass as well.
As someone mentioned below, some eyetracking might be useful to see if the person is actually looking at the screen.
We’ll have to see how this develops. I think certain interfaces will fit certain use-cases very well. And we’ll end up using that for that use-case. There is no one solution.
The technical people didn’t think the iPad would be much of a succes either.
And the keyboard is still the fastest interface to get stuff done, but that doesn’t mean people will use it for everything.
Hmmm… well…
You just greeted your assistant when he walked trough the door. You turned back to your screen and in full horror realized you just lost 4 hours of work by closing the application without saving by just waving your hand.
Very “handy” indeed…
Edited 2013-05-21 11:22 UTC
I certainly hope this has drivers for Linux as well.
I can see this being possibly useful for behind window terminals for public kiosks, etc which don’t allow direct physical access to the screen.
My basic philosophy of humans is that we are inherently lazy (and always on the lookout for ways through which we can be even more lazy) and as such my predictions for the future are always with that in mind.
My bet is therefore on a combination of eye tracking and voice control making it big in UI’s come tomorrow (yes, even in mobile/tablet where touch actually works rather effortlessly).
As for the desktop, having to reach out and touch a desktop screen is never going to gain mass appeal with the lazy unwashed masses (like me), and seriously I doubt a hand gesture based UI will either.
Still there should be some interesting niche uses for this technology, reduz mentioned 3d sculpting which certainly is an interesting proposition.