Woz & Jobs 2.0: Leap Motion's Holtz & Buckwald

theodp writes "Over at Popular Science, Tom Foste takes a look at the $79 Leap Motion controller and inventors David Holz and Michael Buckwald, best friends since they were fifth graders in Florida. Potential applications for the device are many, as proof-of-concept demos ranging from controlling Windows 8 (video) to driving JPL's Athlete Rover (video) show. 'If we're successful and build something that is a fundamentally better way to interact with a computer, there are essentially an unlimited number of use cases,' Buckwald says. 'Eventually, anything that has a computer could be controlled with it—every laptop, every desktop, every smartphone, every tablet, every TV, every surgical station, every robot, potentially even a Leap in every car.' And even if 'it's got some growing pains to experience,' writes Ars Technica's Lee Hutchinson, 'it's cool-it's extremely cool. It's not yet a game-changing interface device, but it could be.'"

Comments

Douglas Engelbart

[icebike]

Seems to me these guys would be the new Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse or E.A. Johnson, and Hurst, inventors of the Touchscreen rather than likening them to the twin gods of Woz & Jobs, who really invented nothing.

If it works we may eventually see the demise of keyboards and mice.

Re:Douglas Engelbart

[confused one]

Woz and Jobs didn't invent anything but they were on the bleeding edge of commoditization of computers. The Apple II was one of the first computers available to the general public, which the average person could buy and use. The Commodore PET came out about the same time. There were a couple of CP/M based machines available a few years prior; but, in the 1975 timeframe even a CP/M system tended to be hideously expensive. It was unlikely anyone outside of a serious hobbyist would buy one for personal use. Machines like the Altair 8800 were the smallest and cheapest computers available at the time the Apple II was introduced, and a complete system could easily cost thousands of dollars.

For the sake of full disclosure: I was around to see all of this (as a teenager) and learned on these machines.

Re:Douglas Engelbart

[chihowa]

Do you want mine? I cancelled my pre-order a month after the first set of delays, but they sent me one anyway.

I can't really tell what it's going to be useful for. The precision is too low for anything but vague gestures and there's no mapping between the screen and your hands, so you can't manipulate stuff on the screen accurately. [I was hoping that they'd use the localization for your head, as well as your hands, and use head location to guess eye location and let you actually manipulate what you see. That's not how it works.] You don't manipulate things by grasping or pointing, but my moving your whole hands in gestures. It's very much not a natural interface; if you don't learn the specific gestures, it doesn't do anything useful.

It doesn't work well unless the room is absolutely dark. If the window shades are open, or I even turn on the room light (or sometimes if there is too much white on the monitor), it will complain about "bright lighting" and switch to an even lower precision mode.

Then there are the lack of usable apps (ie, actual uses) for it. It doesn't come with anything but a game and a 3D molecule viewer (which I actually appreciated as a chemist, though the gestures are weird and unintuitive so my coworkers couldn't play with it without instruction first). There are apps in their app store, but I'm not too excited about spending money on them to find out that they are just as kludgy.

It really could have been a cool interface, but it has a very rushed and incomplete feel about it, which is doubly frustrating since it was delayed so long and so many times. I don't see the Woz and Jobs connection at all, though. The device is neat, in concept, but badly executed and the PR and launch seem to be very poorly handled.

Re:Douglas Engelbart

[Zaphod-AVA]

Woz didn't invent anything? Well, since I can't stab you through the internet, I'll post something from the Wikipedia entry.

        US Patent No. 4,136,359 — "Microcomputer for use with video display"[34] — for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
        US Patent No. 4,210,959 — "Controller for magnetic disc, recorder, or the like"[35]
        US Patent No. 4,217,604 — "Apparatus for digitally controlling PAL color display"[36]
        US Patent No. 4,278,972 — "Digitally-controlled color signal generation means for use with display"[37]

Leap Motion performance

[Anonymous Coward]

I've ordered a Leap Motion and tested it an hour ago. I have to say, it's quite dissappointing. It becomes quite warm and the computer also uses 20-50% cpu. On top of that, it's not accurate at all. It's reasonable at detecting single fingers. The orientation of the hand is way off.

Perhaps it'll improve, but right now, it's not usable as anything but a gimmick.

Leap doesn't work

[flarb936]

I've played a few Leap games and it just doesn't work at all. They were just totally unplayable. In one case the game was designed specifically for Leap and the other was using the Leap as a mouse/touch replacement. In both cases the game constantly freaked out when Leap couldn't figure out where your hands were, or started tracking some random thing like your watch or a sleeve, etc. I had to keep removing my hands from the view area to 'reset' the game. This happened consistently throughout the game. After awhile I just gave up in frustration.

Kinect (both 1 and 2 which are each based on completely different tech) is a FAR SUPERIOR tracking solution--but it's much larger and expensive.

It's funny to see this company get all this hype for a device that essentially doesn't work.

Not gonna work

[50000BTU_barbecue]

except for a few times a day. You can't hold your arm up all day like that. This lesson keeps getting learned every few years or so, going all the way back to the first light pen on the SAGE. It was called Gorilla Arm back then.

Re:So then..

[jklovanc]

Will Buckwald steal from Holtz too?

More PR hype, what, Leap isn't selling?

[janoc]

We have two Leaps at the office, I had a chance to play with it and look at the SDK. Unfortunately, as the recent CNN article points out, it is a solution looking for a problem.
The device is nothing else but two cellphone cameras with an USB interface and 3 infrared LEDs behind an IR filter. It tracks the infrared reflections off your fingertips (or a pencil or whatever) in 3D using stereoscopic vision. It does work, as much as that technology allows (nothing really revolutionary there), but the device and mainly its software have some serious issues:

• The device is way too small - the consequence is that the cameras are too close together and thus the tracked working volume is tiny. If you use both hands at the same time, you can barely move before you run out of space and the camera stops tracking your hand.
• It is very sensitive to occlusions - if the fingers (or some reflection) aren't visible, no tracking. E.g. making a grabbing gesture is really hard, because closing the hand into a fist hides the fingertips and the software gets confused. Rotating a closed hand is outright impossible - the software doesn't know how to distinguish the top and the bottom of the hand unless it can see the fingers (i.e. you are holding the palm open and spread out)
• The API is more targeted towards emulating a mouse or a multitouch desktop than actual 3D interaction. Unfortunately, a real mouse or a proper touchscreen are way more comfortable, accurate and robust to use for such tasks than the Leap, with its glitchy tracking and buggy software. There is no way to get the raw video from the SDK, so no custom algorithms are possible.
• The available software is crap. There is no way around it. The very buggy "Airspace store" is full of paid apps that are often little more than a buggy demo that you would throw away after 5 minutes once the novelty of wiggling your fingers at the screen wears off. Yay for drawing with your finger in the air ... Many of the apps are things that could be hacked together in Flash in a few minutes. Furthermore, many of the available apps try to do things that would be way better handled using a simple mouse or some other controller, thus there is little benefit from using the Leap.

So all in all - unless you are the type of person that wants to show off at the next Powerpoint presentation by changing slides by waving one's hands (and be a laughing stock when the device won't work or skip several slides instead), there isn't much to be excited about. It is really a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Ummm, yey!

[Em Adespoton]

So...I can't wrest my arms on the table anymore? Screw this* thing.

* A more florid description was actually used.

I wouldn't want to wrest your arms from the table... so how about you put this thing underneath glass? You could even put it on the floor and wave your feet over it too. Or, you could have it track your eyes, nose and mouth.

To me the neat thing is the 3-D cone tracking more than the gesture interpretation -- it looks like it is actually tracking the shapes inside the cone, which could let you use it for small-object 3D modeling, high-quality facial recognition, etc. The fact that it tracks to 0.001 mm could be extremely useful; this thing should be able to detect blood flow patterns in your skin, for example, and detect the dilation of your pupils as well as any facial tics. It should have no problem interpreting ASL, for example, and should even be able to recognize speech (via throat analysis and lip reading).

To me, the demos so far are great at showing how it can be applied in a replacing kind of way -- but this tech could open up new interfaces and applications we haven't even conceived of yet.

Personally, I'd love to see one of these melded with a kinect and the force feedback device using air puffs we read about a month or so ago -- throw in the magnetohologram display and siri/google voice-style voice recognition, and you've got an amazing solution that can probably tell more about you than you can tell about yourself.

Tactile feedback's really the big issue, although this could be great as a device to embed in lecture podiums. As long as it can monitor the gestures we make at rest, it could be useful.