Slashdot Mirror
The Leap: Gesture Control Like Kinect, But Cheaper and Higher Resolution
MrSeb writes "It seems Minority Report-style computer interfaces might arrive a whole lot sooner than we expected: A new USB device, called The Leap, creates an 8-cubic-feet bubble of 'interaction space,' which detects your hand gestures down to an accuracy of 0.01 millimeters — about 200 times more accurate than 'existing touch-free products and technologies,' such as your smartphone's touchscreen or Microsoft Kinect. Unfortunately Leap Motion (the company behind the Leap) is being very tight-lipped about the technology being used, but it's probably some kind of infrared LIDAR (radar, but using light), or perhaps a high-resolution version of Kinect (which only uses a 640x480 camera). It's available to pre-order for $70 — and developers can register for a free device + SDK."
"about 200 times more accurate than 'existing touch-free products and technologies,' such as your smartphone's touchscreen"
They sure have a bizarre definition of "touch-free" if it includes a touchscreen.
I'm having trouble understanding exactly what kinds of technology this device is using to obtain accuracy on the level of 10 micrometers for $70. On the website they only state:
Leap Motion technology is a breakthrough in computer interaction, using a patented mathematical approach to 3D, touch-free motion sensing and motion control software that’s unlike anything that currently exists on the market or in academia. Developed over the past 4 years, Leap Motion moves far beyond the current technologies designed for distant arm waving.
But that say a whole lot of nothing... Why are they being so coy about the technology behind the device? According to cnet, the company says:
"It's not as if we're using lots of processing power or some new hardware that just came on to the market," he said. "This is really about a fundamental scientific breakthrough, many Eureka moments that (Holz) stumbled through over four or five years of research."
So they want me to believe they came up with some magic algorithm, and not some new hardware tech? Because as far as I'm aware, the limitations in most sensors is hardware based, not software.
Personally, I'll be registering for a developer kit; or buying one outright to help a friend of mine with ALS. Since she's severely limited in movement, the ability to control her computer (and thereby much of her enviornment) via small recognizable gestures would be a drastic improvement for her quality of life.
... i need exactly ONE GESTURE to communicate with it.
There are plenty of environments where keyboards aren't ideal or even possible... think about a hospital OR (viewing PACS data) or media-based presentation. Such setups could also be helpful in other areas where sanitary rules would make touch-less devices a much better solution, like food processing plants and restaurants, etc.
Of course what's wrong with only 640K anyway? I guess people just haven't learn to code properly.
I would love to be able to lean back, rest my elbows on my chair armrest, forearms vertical, and control stuff by moving my fingers around. Much less strain on the wrists.,since the hands would be directly over them and in a neutral position.
Just want to mention, these guys are currently funding up and looking to put a shine on their company. With the secrecy all you're getting is their own spin, no actual info, and they are very much doing it do create buzz for their funding.
This is not a tech story, it's a stock pump in disguise. I'm not saying it's a pump and dump, but this is a pump for sure. It seems to be aligned with the Facebook IPO news to try to catch more ears.
I say this because I heard this news last week through my parents, who have an aggressive stockbroker who brings them endless "get rich quick" stock pumps. And for some reason they don't get rid of the guy even though he's pretty much all the worst things you can think of in a stockbroker. Must be a friend of the family.
Why do we need all these fucking gestures and shit? I guess most people still haven't figured out how to TYPE.
Typing is an unnatural interface that we've just grown accustomed to. After a while, we've become quite good at typing, but it's still an interface that one has to actually learn to use.
A more natural interface would be speech, but speech recognition is still far from the reliability of a keyboard.
On a parallel path, the mouse, while much (MUCH) more natural than a keyboard, can still get better. As soon as 2D displays are really replaced by 3D, mice would have to become 3D also.
The first problem was that 2D display (screen) and 2D gesture recognition (mouse) were easier than speech recognition. And now we are in a similar situation with 3D mice (this) and 3D screens (still crap).
The beauty of it all it that they'll all eventually converge in the same spot. Thought input and though output.
0.01 mm * 200 woudl be 2 mm for Kinect. That seems accurate enough to me. It's pretty darn small.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Speech is an unnatural interface, that one has to learn to use. It is also slow, inaccurate and cumbersome. Those are the problem when using it to interacts with other humans, trying to use it with computers is even worse.
The mouse is less natural, try to show an old person one. They will prefer the keyboard. 3D displays will not
Missing the point: it is not about computers, its about a wall mounted intelligent tv with automatic voice-command recognition that can turn your coffee on or off, download your tv episodes ...etc.
The future for computers has always been ubiquity, invisibility and support for daily shit.
NO SIG
Considering they're not one, not two, but NINETEEN versions behind in their OpenSSL software (currently at 0.9.8x) AND they're running FrontPage extensions, I have little confidence in their online process for creating accounts and placing orders. Oh, and they're 2 versions behind on Apache as well.
Apache/2.2.19 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.19 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at www.leapmotion.com Port 80
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
$70 pre-order for "expected" delivery next year. Article short on details, long on promises. A website where many of the pages don't function. I think I'm better off buying a 2-3 shares of Facebook.
FOV is 57 horizontally and 43, with a maximum range of about 20 ft. I don't know how much volume that is, but it's significantly larger than 8 cubic feet.
Come on /., lets do some redneck engineering estimating with VLM down here at the high tech redneck (server) farm.
Lets wiggle your numbers to something smaller because I'm a lazy SOB and assume kinect only gives you a square of 40 degrees and only 1 foot deep precisely at 20 feet. Kin we all take a swig of grannie's recipe outta mason jar even tho its kinda early in the morning and agree that my grotesque simplification is a profound lower bound? Its going to be way huger than this estimate.
So 40 degrees up and down is really two rather acute right triangles of 20 degrees at the pointy end and, as you say, 20 feet on the adjacent side. Essentially we wanna solve for opposite side, times two because there's two right triangles, and square it to get square feet, and call it good because we're only looking at the one foot wide layer at 20 feet away (the true volume is way the heck larger, this is just a lower bound).
OK, sstill with me here? trig, um, 30 years ago, thats what "soh cah toa" tangent is opposite over adjacent. So tangent 20 deg = x/20. Tangent of 20 degrees is about a third... you can either trust me on that because I'm old, or you can GOOG it. Some basic algebra shows 1/3 = x/20 is the same as 1/3*20 = x in other words its a bit more than 6 feet, 6 * 3 being about 18 and 6*4 being too big for 20. So times 2 because there's two triangles means 12 feet. 12 feet up n down by 12 feet left n right at that 20 foot distance is 12*12=144 square feet. So we know it looks at the whole volume (does it?) so considering just that 1 foot shell as a minimum is 144 cubic feet.
Lets think backwards here to check. So if I imagine around a 40 degree triangle flying outta my eye, and look 20 feet away, can I see the ceiling? Yeah, I guess so. So I probably did the math correctly.
As a ridiculous upper bound, the upper bound of this pyramid must be smaller than a cube of 12*12*20 feet, right? So its less than 144*20 = 1440*2 = 2880 cubic feet.
So a kinect looks at between 144 and 2880 cubic feet in volume. This took an old engineering mind about 10 seconds to figure out and 5 minutes to type. In summary yeah its way the heck larger than 8 cuft probably 2 orders of magnitude bigger. But not 3 orders of magnitude bigger.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's never been about need. We don't need the vast majority of technology out there. All you really need is access to food and water, a nice cave to shelter you from the elements, and a way to keep warm. Technology--especially tech such as this--is supposed to make things easier and/or improve quality of life.
"We don't need that" is rarely a good argument. Instead, you should investigate whether the proposed solution will make things better or worse, or have no impact (in which case you don't have to waste resources on it).
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I'd be interested in having the (cooled down) hot water lines in my house purged when I walk into the bathroom in the morning, or the kitchen preparing and cooking my dinner to be ready when my car tells it I'll be home. For that matter, I'd be interested in reading a book all the way home while my car navigated, accident free, through smoothly flowing optimized traffic. Waving at my computer to make 3-D spatial adjustments instead of using a planar pointer just sounds like a good idea.
"For a new technology to be successful, it must replace all usage cases of older technology" /. Anonymous Cowards and Moderators (apparently)
--
In my current setup, I'd say I use my keyboard ~90% of the time and my mouse only about 10%.
Listen: I'm still glad I have the mouse.
--
Maybe she can move her head, or just her whole hand; there could be any number of ways to use this when you can't move a mouse. ALS is horrible, anything which can make life easier for her is a good thing.
... but this has "fake" written all over it.
If they really managed to create an device that tracks multiple objects, in 3D (even when stacked), and with a resolution of 10 microns they won't just revolutionize computers and gaming. I've used industrial sensing devices that cost 100x as much and aren't even remotely capable of such feats.
Why do we need all these fucking gestures and shit? I guess most people still haven't figured out how to TYPE.
That is exactly *why* we need gesture recognition.
People communicate with each other -- and with their pets, and even with pre-verbal babies -- with gestures and not with keyboards.
I often use this as an example of why we continue to need better compute power --- until I can give my computer a dirty look or an obscene gesture to make it stop doing something I don't like, we'll continue to have a need for better human-computer interfaces.
This is *exactly* a step in the right direction -- where the computer learns how humans communicate -- instead of making humans have to learn something convenient for computers (pushing buttons / typing on keyboards).
I was really excited to see this kind of technology until I saw the following on their website:
Patented? Mathematical? It's bad enough that companies are patenting software that is just obscured math, but now they are effing patenting mathematics itself????
This has so many levels of wrong written all over it, I can't begin to explain...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Actually, I don't expect that I'll ever need that much computer assistance for my daily shit. Invisible or otherwise.
But... but... HOW will you manage without toilet paper sheet counting and averaging? You will actually have to remember to go buy T.P. instead of having Amazon ship you a case every so often automatically. Also, properly placed sensors can make sure you wipe properly, and then ask if you would like to upload a video of your last "download"...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I'd be interested in having the (cooled down) hot water lines in my house purged when I walk into the bathroom in the morning
That can be done by a plumber... or yourself if you are ambitious. Run a return line from your bathroom branch of your plumbing to a lower point on your water heater (there's a drain valve at the bottom... you can 'T' off before that) and natural convection of water will ensure that your pipes are always "charged" with hot water from your water heater. It's called a hot water loop or a recirculating loop.
Link
Page 5 (You can usually forgo the pump if your water heater is in the basement)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.