Over the past eight months or so, a new company in San Francisco called Leap Motion has been gathering attention in the computer world, culminating earlier this month in a couple of big business deals. Leap Motion makes software and hardware that allow computer users to interface with their machines through hand gestures, rather than using a keyboard, mouse, or touch screen. This technology can track hand motions as small as 1/100th of a millimeter in three dimensions. Some people think this could lead to revolutionary changes in the way we interact with our computers.
- This tiny gizmo could be a very big deal in 2013 — and beyond (ReadWrite/Dan Lyons) “Basically the engineers at Leap Motion have invented the 3D user interface of the future. You don’t use a keyboard and mouse; you don’t even use a touch screen. You just move your fingers in the air, and, as if by magic, with zero latency and pinpoint accuracy, stuff happens on your screen.”
- A look inside Leap Motion, the 3D gesture control that’s like Kinect on steroids (The Verge/David Pierce) “The simplest thing it can do is simulate a touch screen, so you can interact with any display as if it were touch-enabled — we were slicing pineapples in Fruit Ninja in seconds, without a moment of extra development or additional software. Developers that do take advantage of the Leap’s SDK will be able to do much more, however, and the possibilities appear to be limited only by your imagination.”
- Leap Motion gets $30M to change how you interact with computers (GigaOM/Stacey Higginbotham) “That’s a nice win in the computing space, but the real question for me is can a new UI change how we interact with computers, and perhaps help keep the PC relevant? David Holz, the co-founder and CTO of Leap told me that he helped invent the product because he wanted to do things on his computer, like play an instrument or make a model, that were made far too complicated by the existing programs limited by drop down menus necessitated by having a keyboard or mouse interface.”
- Leap Motion motion control tech to be bundled with Asus PCs (CNET/Daniel Terdiman) “When Leap Motion first announced its technology, it expected the Leap would be ideal for industries like surgery, gaming, architecture, design, engineering, and more. But almost from the get-go, some of the most interesting projects developers were suggesting involved things like automatically translating sign language.”
Video fact:
Leap Motion has its own YouTube channel of demo videos, which have been viewed over 8 million times since the channel was started last May.
