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Leap

leapmotion.com

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Re: Leap

#31

Post by debacle »

lukev wrote: post #27
StavrosK wrote: post #9

Whenever I see something like this, I immediately think of gorilla arm syndrome. There's a reason I was saying they will never become widespread when all my friends were screaming about Minority Report-style interfaces (ever since Minority Report).

"Gorilla arm" was a term originally tied to touch screens that the user had to reach out and touch a screen in front of them. If the Leap can detect small motions of your hands as they lay on the desk, then using one would look nothing like a "minority report" interface, and avoid gorilla arm.

You still have to consider the muscle strain involved in the round trip from your eyes to your fingers.

When typing, you don't really wait for the text to show up on screen before going on to the next letter, and chances are you're hitting backspace before you recognize the letters because you already know you screwed up.

With this interface, you'll have no such luck. You'll type slower, have more errors, and also have muscle strain from not having a more immediate response.

Re: Leap

#32

Post by username3 »

lukev wrote: post #26
jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

If you look at it, it's quite sensitive enough to follow finger motions, not only whole hand motions. So it could even follow your fingers as your hands rest on a desk. I'm not convinced the lack of tactile feedback is a problem provided there is very good visual feedback. Do you have any studies to this point? Furthermore, I think basic pointing and pinching are only the beginning of the capabilities this system can…

If you look at it, it's quite sensitive enough to follow finger motions, not only whole hand motions. So it could even follow your fingers as your hands rest on a desk.

I agree, you don't need to use your whole arm. It's like playing tennis on the Wii. You don't have to flail your arms around. You just need enough motion for the accelerometers.

Re: Leap

#33

Post by colmvp »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

The way I see it, it's an innovative interface that has no drawbacks to us (users and companies) in testing it. If it's not intuitive or useful, people won't use it and either the company adapts to the users or will fold. Simple as that.

Re: Leap

#34

Post by marquis »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

There are many good reasons this is a useful product: demoing 3D models, education platforms, music performance.. I love my keyboard when working but aren't the wii and kinect one of the most successful gaming platforms? If this has a good API there's no reason it can't fill a niche need.

Re: Leap

#35

Post by skizm »

tibbon wrote: post #28

There's too much focus here on the assumption that this will be used as a full-time computing input device. I don't think anyone is realistically advocating banishment of all keyboard/mice to the netherworld. Let's be more creative than that. Think about using it as an alternate input in spaces that a physical keyboard/mouse isn't appropriate, and also 'short term computing'. Will this replace input on your workstati…

Ultimately no this will not replace the keyboard and mouse but these guys seem to think it will. Check out the headline on the about page:

> Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard.

Re: Leap

#36

Post by tibbon »

skizm wrote: post #35
tibbon wrote: post #28

There's too much focus here on the assumption that this will be used as a full-time computing input device. I don't think anyone is realistically advocating banishment of all keyboard/mice to the netherworld. Let's be more creative than that. Think about using it as an alternate input in spaces that a physical keyboard/mouse isn't appropriate, and also 'short term computing'. Will this replace input on your workstati…

Ultimately no this will not replace the keyboard and mouse but these guys seem to think it will. Check out the headline on the about page: > Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard.

I'm reading that as more of a marketing/concept line. I'm pretty sure that if you'd walk into their offices they'd all still got keyboard/mouse combos still.

Re: Leap

#37

Post by michaelleland »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

I can imagine a world that uses this or similar technology, holograms, and some sort of soft electrical shock to manipulate 3D interfaces.

Don't write it off. This might be Xerox Parc's mouse, waiting for Jobs.

Re: Leap

#38

Post by robg »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

As an embodied cognition guy, I disagree here pretty strongly. Gestures are a powerful form of communication - consider deaf signers, scuba divers, even in time sensitive operations like military and sports. Gestures likely have a deeper evolutionary history than spoken language too. They are intuitive. Babies mimic long before they speak or manipulate.

Re: Leap

#39

Post by orillian »

esolyt wrote: post #20
dsirijus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are implying hand waving all around with such use case. I, for instance, imagine it as replacement for trackpad - I type happily on my keyboard, and I just do some slight gestures for scrolling, switching, closing, minimizing and pointing. And all while keeping my hands close to home row. It's even in similar form factor as trackpads! I don't know why everyone thinks it will be like signaling on an airport or doi…

Why is it more difficult to do those gestures on the trackpad? The trackpad is closer to your keyboard and it is very quick to switch between the two.

The fact that a trackpad is closer is one of it's failings. I disable the trackpad on my laptop unless I'm in a space that I can't use a mouse, due primarily to the fact that the trackpad has a bad habit of getting touched or bumped by my hands as I type. If I could shift my hands forward past my keys to gesture up or down to scroll I believe the issue would be negated.

I'd love to see a laptop with one of the leap devices embedded just along to top edge of the keyboard as an alternative to the trackpad.

Re: Leap

#40

Post by jaysonelliot »

robg wrote: post #38
jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

As an embodied cognition guy, I disagree here pretty strongly. Gestures are a powerful form of communication - consider deaf signers, scuba divers, even in time sensitive operations like military and sports. Gestures likely have a deeper evolutionary history than spoken language too. They are intuitive. Babies mimic long before they speak or manipulate.

That's an interesting perspective that I hadn't thought of before.

The usual approach to a 3D gestural interface is the kind of thing that's shown in the video for Leap—writing in the air, using mimed actions in space to represent manipulation of objects on a 2D screen, et cetera.

Gestures as an abstraction, like sign language or even the everyday hand gestures we use like flipping the bird, the "A-OK" sign, and such make a lot more sense. If you move away from the idea of using hand waving as a stand-in for direct manipulation of objects, and look at gestures as a form of communication, it's a whole different ball game.

Thanks for that. I still look at the demo video for Leap with fear and loathing, but using that same hardware for a communicative gesture system like you suggest is exciting indeed. Now I'm going to be distracted all day thinking about ways to incorporate hand signs into a UI.

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