LeapMotion controller

[apocrypha]

So I ordered one of these as much as a curiosity as anything else. It arrived today and I plugged it in and spent about an hour playing with it.

I would recommend to anyone interested in the concept to avoid this iteration for now. It's interesting, but almost impossible to use for anything except the most basic of games and demonstrations. The visions of Minority Report style interaction with your PC are just pipe dreams and the reality of the LeapMotion exposes the many faults in that idea.

Firstly it's just not accurate enough. It can detect your fingers and thumb (one hand only) as separate entities but there needs to be a decent amount of space between them. Move a couple of fingers too close and they merge into a single digit. The detection area is also quite small in some ways but annoyingly large in other ways. To get the activation area in a position that's comfortable to use you need a large, clear desk and probably a standing space rather than a seated position. However if you're standing then the detection area is just too small to be useful.

Secondly, the PC interface is just completely wrong for this kind of control. With high resolution monitors you need very precise cursor movements to interact with programs. Icons and buttons are tiny really and having to move your fingers in 3 dimensional space that accurately is extremely difficult.

There is also a pronounced lag between movement and response. It's not huge, but it's big enough to make it feel like your cursor is moving through treacle. This magnifies the inherent inaccuracy greatly. Having no visual interface that you're fingers are directly interacting with also means that you can't tell where you're cursor is going to be until you actually start moving. Going back to the Minority Report example, what you need is fully 3 dimensional holographic interfaces that are large enough to use whilst standing and with big hand/arm movements. You need something to actually click on with the hand instead of waving it about in an invisible detection hemisphere.

I played with a few apps from the dedicated app store and they all suffer from these problems. They're either just gimmicky demonstrations, like playing music by waving your hands about or painting crappy finger paint style pics, or they're games and things that would simply be better played with a mouse.

So, an interesting step in the evolution of motion-controlled interfaces but for now so seriously lacking in utility and sensitivity as to be nothing more than a curio.

[K9]

How tiring was it to use? It seems that one of the big advantages of KB+Mouse is that my arms are resting on something, and all the movements can be relatively tiny.

[apocrypha]

That was something I forgot to mention, it was *very* tiring very quickly. Within about 5 minutes my arm was aching and that probably reduced my accuracy even further.

[Bungee]

Waiting on mine to finally arrive... From what I heard up to now, most of the flaws right now are supposedly software issues. The hardware itself is or should be capable of precision in the fraction of a milimeter range. So I'm holding out hope for smartly engineered software to use the potential to its fullest.

[apocrypha]

I hope that's the case, for sure.

One thing that I think needs to be improved is the responsiveness and it's ability to recognise gestures. If, for instance, you could position the cursor and then draw a small circle to click that'd be much easier than moving your fingertip forwards & backwards to click.

I'm also waiting on delivery of a monitor bracket and arm since I need to create more space on my desk for other reasons (drawing tablet mainly). I'll have a think and a rearrange of the whole area and see if I can come up with a more comfortable position for the LeapMotion.

[Bungee]

I hope that's the case, for sure.

One thing that I think needs to be improved is the responsiveness and it's ability to recognise gestures. If, for instance, you could position the cursor and then draw a small circle to click that'd be much easier than moving your fingertip forwards & backwards to click.

I'm also waiting on delivery of a monitor bracket and arm since I need to create more space on my desk for other reasons (drawing tablet mainly). I'll have a think and a rearrange of the whole area and see if I can come up with a more comfortable position for the LeapMotion.

Just from reading some reviews I think alot of issues can be solved by smart software. E.g, some complained that when you wanted to click something by moving your finger forward, the cursor would drop a few pixels and you miss what you wanted to click. Well,that's just the software following your movement because the finger DOES drop due to anatomy of the elbow when extending your arm. Simple axis restrictions or movement scaling dependent of the speed you actually move along an axis paired with smart action prediction/restriction should help a great deal already in such regard.

And I thought about placing the controller on top of my monitor facing down in an angle or on a shelf to my right also at a downfacing angle. I hope it is or will be possible to rotate planes such that these more 'exotic' setups are supported as well.

[Ghambit]

I may be selling mine if anyone wants it.