I'm at South by Southwest mainly to help talk about about mobile games in China and then to dive deep into the annual music/meat/margaritas mess, but I also got a chance to catch a demo of Leap Motion, the 3D mouse I blogged about last year. Back then I said "If it works as demoed above, it could transform desktop/laptop computing," and now having actually done the demo, I'd say yes, that's quite possibly the case. The connection between your gestures and the objects on the screen feels responsive, intuitive, and even tactile, because the sense of moving objects on the display makes you also almost feel them, so to speak. My first question for the Leap demo person was, "How long do people do this before their arms get tired?".
She said that since most people use Leap with their laptops, they just prop their elbows on the table, to minimize the effort. (The motion capture technology creates a two square foot "box" of awareness around the device.) Another thing that stood out: During a demo of the dev kit, the demo-er mentioned this tech could be used for content creation. (For instance, composing music.) Imagine 3D content creation merged to this tech -- creating builds in Second Life and Minecraft and beyond through the pantomime of your hands.
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I'd hope detailed short-range gestures that are possible with the Leap motion could be combined with the Kinect's full-room, lower-resolution detection for full upper body detection.
The Kinect fails at close range, so it's bad for gestures, but it's long range allows for things like full body posture and motion capture.
The two combined would be perfect.
Posted by: Adeon Writer | Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 03:18 PM