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The Leap Motion Controller is Sort of Like a Super Kinect (Video)
What the Leap Motion product (they only have one right now) does is allow you to control your computer with gestures. We're not talking about just jumping around, but "painting" on the screen with your fingers (or even chopsticks) with fine enough control that Autodesk and other drawing-orientd software vendors are working to make applications compatible with the Leap Motion Controller. And game developers? You bet! Lots of them -- and this is for a device that's not even supposed to start shipping until May 13. But, says CEO Michael Buckwald, they already have "hundreds of thousands of pre-orders," so it looks like they are developing a large market for developers (over 12,000 are in the Leap Motion developer program -- out of 50,000 who applied) so it's possible that Leap Motion could become a pretty big deal. (You can see the Leap Motion Controller in action at the end of the video.)
Seems like a huge missed opportunity for Microsoft.
While I'm all for new and exciting technology, I'm not sure I like having cameras around that can be hacked, and visual interfaces that may record motions I make that I do not intend to go into a computer.
The simplest example would be idly picking my nose, and then coming back later to find those exciting strokes recorded. For those of you who are pornography enthusiasts, a similar problem exists.
Although keyboards are arguably pretty bad, they don't interpret my actions for me. I have to deliberately seek out the keyboard and type on it. It can't watch me or misinterpret me.
Now my only enemy is my own tendency toward tyops and speeling errors.
"I find you lack of faith disturbing..."
Except I don't see Android or Linux on the list of things they run on
Would be quite nice for tablet, phone or android stick attached to giant TV.
>>The Leap Motion Controller will change the way you work without changing what already works for you. So it doesn’t replace your keyboard, mouse, stylus, or trackpad. It works with them, and without special adapters. Just plug it into the USB on your Mac or PC, and you’re off.
This.
Because once attached to your computer, it can never be removed, disabled, or turned off.
This turns any computer into a touchscreen. It should have come built in to all windows 8 keyboards: the metro tiles would finally make sense.
I was highly unimpressed with the demo at SXSW and I've heard mixed reviews from people that got into the dev program.
It seems to be sunlight sensitive and it likes to randomly drop elements that it is tracking, maybe just a driver issue and I'm sure it could improve, but at the moment I'm not impressed.
Virtually every laptop sold in the country has a built-in camera. What's the distinction of this?
I'm pulling my money out of foolish things like municipal bonds and buying stock in companies which make rotator cuff treatments and therapies because that is apparently going to be a huge growth area soon.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Speed and accuracy without crushing your cpu. Also, the FOV isn't static w/ respect to your monitor.
With respect to watching you without your permission due to unspecified hax.
Remember that show.. well, the tech which it was made of, is slowly, but surely coming to reality..
If I could idly pick my nose I wouldn't need to be a pornography enthusiast.
I saw the demo at SXSW and wasn't all that impressed. A demo I have been impressed by, however, is the DUO, which is currently on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/codelabs/duo-the-worlds-first-diy-3d-sensor) looking for $100,000 to bring their open solution to market. If nothing else, those guys will give LEAP some competition - and that's always a good thing. That they're planning to have Linux support is a huge plus.
Aslan translator
So now we can play first-person shooters by pointing a finger an yelling "Pew-pew-pew"?
Virtually every laptop sold in the country has a built-in camera. What's the distinction of this?
It's not normally on. As soon as you make the camera an always on input method, then well.. its always on.
But the leap doesnt contain a camera
Imagine how amazing this would be for the porn industry. They could target ad's to you so much easier based on your ... ummm ... big or small hand gestures?
Fair enough, I can't really deny that. But the default behavior is not to record, so it still requires external intervention to spy, which is exactly what is requisite for current technology. The only discernible difference is a little green LED.
Why wouldn't they consider it part of the mainline SDK? There are a lot of engineers and developers working on Linux.
It is yet not possible to truly compare both systems. The Kinect has a range of several meters and produces a colored pointcloud. The Leap has a range of less than a meter and currently only returns the position of the fingertips. Full Body tracking is therefore not possible with a single Leap.
You can also say that the Kinect is a Super-Leap motion since the sensing range is much larger and the Kinect is able to capture several persons and not only the fingers of a single one.
its a spam bot, best I can tell - its been posting it as first post to almost every article I've read on /. the last couple of days.
Hopefully the fine folks over at /. or Dice get around to blocking it sooner than later
The only discernible difference is a little green LED.
That little green LED tells me whether or not I'm potentially being recorded. If its on, and I'm not in a video call, something is wrong and I'm very suspicious.
With an always on camera trained on you, an LED would be meaningless -- if it existed it's always on. So you will never know if you are being recorded or not.
Call me paranoid, but I just put a small piece of black electrical tape over the camera. Can't really even see it against my black laptop, and I KNOW the camera isn't recording me.
It's supposedly being worked on, check out their forums.
Yeah, it would be terrible if videos of you picking your nose went up on the internet. As opposed to your bank account passwords, credit card details, actual pornography habits and home address and real name - because if someone can hack the camera its far easier to just log keystrokes and take a screen grab of your desktop every minute.
Talk about identifying the wrong the problem.
It seems like you dont have to click keys anymore. You just "air type" and have an app convert it to keys.
Musical keyboards too.
Yes, that's actually somewhat consistent with paranoid personality disorder. But there's more than one symptom to that, and it would be insanity to diagnose a stranger on the internet from 2 sentences.
Am I the only one that couldn't handle listening to the audio in that clip? One guy is speaking into my left ear and the other guy into my right. It's like I'm standing between them staring off orthogonally, but the video has me looking right at the interviewee. Makes my head spin.
Do us a favor and mix it down to mono.
I would have been happy to buy a device and possibly develop for it, but they have really horrible developer support. They don't let you even download the SDK! Apparently 40,000 people applied to the developer program, but they are only giving access to people that they have decided to give free devices. Their actual end-user device is shipping soon, but we can't even download the SDK? WTF??? It is cheap and I would be happy to buy one. But, without an SDK it is pretty worthless to me...
If OEMs start incorporating it into their PCs and MSFT/Windows supports it...I'm sure Windows will be fine.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Right. But it's far quicker and easier to address the camera issue with a small piece of tape that will solve the problem (or lack thereof, granted) permanently in less than a minute than it is to satisfactorily address the other issues you mention.
Jeeze people, lighten up...
Leap motion tracks finger-tips when the user is nice enough to make this easy for the device. Relative accuracy in optimal circumstances can clearly be better than one might expect. Absolute accuracy is poor, so its no replacement for touch-screens.
Worse, the LM needs massive amounts of CPU processing to do the motion tracking.
All this means that as a general purpose input device, the LM is utterly useless. The designers understood this problem, which is why they gave away so many development models, in the desperate hope that they could 'crowd source' some new killer apps for the device.
Take a simple consideration. How do you tell LM your input has stated? You can't- not reliably. How do you tell it input has stopped? Again, you can't. The device allows for no 'punctuation'. With a mouse, the buttons provide the 'punctuation' or state changes. With a touch tablet, punctuation occurs because finger detection happens over a VERY thin 2D plane.
In comparison, 3D motion tracking devices do not allow sane methods for the user to distinguish between 'motion' and 'punctuation'. Idiots that will respond with 'gestures' are too stupid to realise that gestures are the very worst way to try to inform the input device that you wish to signal 'puntuation' (state change). At best, a 'gesture' (like wiggling a finger) might be recognised some of the time, if the point at which the motion input stops can be relatively fuzzy.
I'm sorry, but such input devices have been with us since the 60s (albeit in a much bigger form) and no-one has found a way to overcome the 'punctuation' problem. The 'ten' point detection is also pointless, given that most humans would have trouble usefully inputting more than two controlled points with their fingers (given that the cameras that 'see' the fingers point only upward, and thus cannot handle 'over-lapping' fingers at all well).
LM thus falls back to use as a gaming peripheral, where accuracy of input isn't important- like the Kinect. Unfortunately, LM is insanely expensive as a gaming 'controller'- it really needs to be $30. It is really the equivalent of a 'light gun' or 'power glove'. However, this form of gaming is almost exclusive found on the consoles, not the PC. So even worse, LM becomes (if very very lucky) that cool sounding gizmo that loads of people buy, mess with for a day or so, then stick in a drawer never to be thought about again- like those hardware text-to-speech modules from TI all those years ago.
"While I'm all for new and exciting technology, I'm not sure I like having cameras around that can be hacked, and visual interfaces that may record motions I make that I do not intend to go into a computer."
The LEAP does not take pictures. It does not even contain a camera.
While it works kind of like a Kinect (in that they both use light), the similarity pretty much stops there.
You're "caught red-handed" Jeremiah Cornelius -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741
I wrote ALL ABOUT IT (& why you're doing it), here -> http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585927&cid=43295193
* DO YOURSELF, and the rest of us, A GIANT FAVOR MAN:
Seek professional psychiatric help!
(Since you obviously can't get over the fact you made a spelling error on what it is YOU ALLEGEDLY DID FOR A LIVING? That's not MY fault... it's YOURS!)
APK
P.S.=> I seriously must have dusted JC (in his mind @ least) for his BAD spelling error & it "got his goat"...
I.E.-> Catching what he claimed to do as a job, for YEARS he left "PENETRATION" spelled as "PENTRATION" on his resume on LinkedIn & I pointed it out as he & his friends trolled me as usual (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, & crew (probably ALL JC no doubt using alterate emails or TOR to do it as a possible - I've caught "them & theirs" doing it before, ala Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person))).
So THAT is what has gotten his goat in a technical debate & his "geek angst" could only come up with *trying* to "impersonate me" in every news thread on /. for the month of March 2013 so far!
(Just to attempt to 'discredit me' as a spammer here obviously)
Doing so, by posting that 10,000 challenge &/or reposts of my old posts on hosts file value to end users into EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE POSTED on /. ...
It's all I can think of that *might* cause such a mentally trouble 'reaction' like the Jeremiah Cornelius is doing!
... apk
Can we not have each speaker panned all the way to one side of the audio channels? It drives me nearly crazy. Thanks.
Fingers and chopsticks that "go where no device has gone before.". :D
No, thank you
Never actually used one, eh? The camera built into my laptop most certainly can be turned off or completely disabled. It also has a little LED next to it that lights when it's active, so it's easy to know when it's on.
I'm pretty sure that guy is drunk or super hung over. He looks and sounds it.
Well then, you should get a leap motion because it doesn't use any cameras, and the data it generate from use would be almost useless (like trying to use a person's typing speed against them).
Rocket Surgeon.
OH NO, the guys at leap motion know can figure out what hand size the owner has. Don't worry that google reads all your emails and tracks web page vists, your phone with GPS and camera is taken with you everywhere, and facebook knows more about you than your mother.
Rocket Surgeon.
And we thought we'd seen the last of Charlie Sheen.
I then go on to talk about visual gestures and how I don't want those recorded.
You seem to have mis-read the original message. I would apologize, but after having re-read it, I don't think it's unclear. I often read things hastily as well, and that can lead to this kind of misunderstanding.
Actually, this can be circumvented, and as this case shows us, it has been done before.
hey now, if everyone were able to identify the actual risks involved with their everyday processes, I'd be out of a consulting job. Don't go trying to encourage people to make sane risk assessments! Not for a couple more years yet, at least - my goal of retiring on a beach in the Caribbean is too close!