LEAP First Look | Control Your Computer With Your Hands

Posted by Tyler W on Jun 2, 2012 in Computers |

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Leap Motion, a small start-up company, has invented a device called the Leap, an Xbox Kinect like device no bigger than a flash drive that let’s you control you computer screen with your hand gestures. Simple hand gestures like hand swipes and flicks are sensored by the device and does the corresponding effect to the visuals on the screen. The Leap is coming into market at $69.99 and is expected to ship Winter 2012.

The Leap plugs into a standard USB port on a laptop or dektop, and conveniently is compatible with Mac and PC. This technology is similar to that of Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect, which reads arm and leg motion to play a game using a webcam like sensor. Leap says they can sense even the slightest movements of a finger making it 200 times more sensitive than anything on the market. Personally, this can be good and bad, if you are unexperienced with the Leap and twitch a finger, it could close a tab of unsaved information, which would be terrible, but the good size is for gaming, like the kinect and as shown in the embedded video, you can move your finger to pull a trigger and realistically game with no controller.

To set up the Leap you just plug it in to the USB port and install the drivers and your off. The Leap, as told by Leap Motion, transforms the 8 cubic feet of air in front of the computer into 3-D interaction space, 3-D interaction space meaning the space for doing gestures. It tracks anything within the space and allows you to do anything you can do with a mouse.

Some of the released gestures you can use with the Leap are; swiping through menus, pinch to zoom, rotate screen orientation. These are all showed in Leap Motion’s demo of the Leap in the embedded video below.

I know for sure I am no doubt getting this for my custom computer the day it comes out, and will be pre-ordering. I am fascinated by this product and can’t wait to use it!

Comment Questions?

What are your thoughts on the Leap? Will you be buying?