Core77
This morning, a San-Francisco-based company called Leap Motion released the demo video for their eponymous gesture control interface, which appears to be shockingly accurate:
It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.... This isn't a game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market -- at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.
The system can distinguish thumbs from figures and tell when you're holding a pencil in your hand. Check it out:
The drawing app looks freaking awesome, and imagine being able to do CAD with your bare hands. That would take some clever tool/interface design on the part of the software developers, but if the Leap is really as easy to use as the manufacturers claim—"Plug the LEAP into a USB port. Load the Leap Motion software. Do a quick wave to calibrate. That's it"—you can be assured said developers will get on it.
Outside of personal computing, I'd love to see the Leap applied to ATMs, so I never had to touch those filthy, smudged and sneezed-upon screens again.
The Leap is currently available for pre-order at $69.99 a pop.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Must-See Video: Gesture Control Accuracy Takes a Huge "Leap" Forward
This device promises not only to change how we interact with computers, but pretty much anything that involves the use of manual controls, like cars, planes, construction equipment, machinery, refrigerators, microwave ovens, cameras, etc.
The applications are boundless