As if to say, "Don't worry we're still developing for Second Life!", check out what coolness Linden Lab just unveiled a day after launching dio -- an experimental Second Life viewer integrated with Leap Motion gesture controls:
Looks like fun, if you can afford the $70 controller, and are a PC user who's willing to sign up as a Leap Motion developer. I definitely think we're going to see some third party viewers integrate this into their code, but probably for limited uses:
More on getting set up here. Hand-waving, as demonstrated, is an obvious feature, but from this demo at least, there's too much lag for this to be useful for moving objects around, and probably too exhausting to incorporate into a finger gun shooting game. And I kind of suspect the Adult-rated content creators are already coming up with their own kinky uses for this too. (Virtual ass slaps across thousands of miles?)
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Interesting experiment. Though for continual use it would of course give you a case of "gorilla arm".
Personally I would be more excited that parametric mesh deformation ( whatever happened to that?) or even a Tablet app / viewer for Android or IOS is in development. It IS possible to control movement in a 3d environment. Just check on the latest Epic Citadel to see what is possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0phPgXeRm78
As always, we residents are never satisfied :)
Posted by: Connie Arida | Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 04:36 PM
Definite step in the right direction.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 06:45 AM
Nice development, but is it Windows OS only? Leap Motion does list Mac OS compatibility. If so, I'd buy one.
Posted by: Iggy | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 07:31 AM
Win D'ohs only...boo. Back to real life.
Posted by: Iggy | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 07:33 AM
LL devs are always developing what is not needed and not wanted instead of working on stability and performance. (Long sighs). They are in bad need of some adults in the LL offices.
Posted by: AJax Manatiso | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 07:33 AM
If this is one step closer to manually peppering my avatar SnowCrash style, I'm all for it.
That wasn't mentioned in the blog post, but I hope it's in the plans, if it is, I'm be buying one if these instantly.
Posted by: Adeon Writer | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 08:13 AM
Woooo, great! They should take one more year and put all their code monkeys to that "#1 task of the 2013"!
Facepalm here, big time.
Seriously. On one side, i'm kinda glad that LL still experimenting with SL and ways of input. But on other... &$%#$@*!!!
Posted by: jake85Harvey | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 12:58 PM
spanking went out in 2007
Posted by: 2013 | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 01:59 PM
It looks like a way of giving something close to a touchscreen to an existing desktop computer with added 3D gestures.
That might be useful, looking at the Windows 8 UI design, but it would need support by the people who produce software--bigger buttons and such.
Just pasting a few things over the existing SL UI isn't enough, I think.
Just think for a moment how game UIs have changed over the life of SL. Things such as camera positions and the use of game controller devices. There's a geek-appeal to what Simon Linden shows us, but I'm not sure Linden Labs has the right talent to make the UI changes needed; management, design, or programming.
And it will have to be a deep enough set of changes that I am not sure that a TPV-team will be able to make them stick.
Posted by: Arabella Jones | Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 11:56 PM
Hmm. So why couldn't you tie the leap into anything that can handle a 3D mouse such as Space Navigator, which SL and opensim already understands? It would give you fancier stuff but it would be a useful first pass.
Posted by: Seren Seraph | Friday, February 01, 2013 at 03:03 PM