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Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

leapmotion.com

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Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Periodic writing with pencil tool Very very inconvenient. Writing on air is completely different and considerably more tricky that writing on paper. Physically more demanding too. It's one of those things that sound nice in theory, but not really practical.

You're right. I just tried it (not with the leap hardware) - the inability to "lift up" off the paper without leaving the sensor zone is weird. No haptic feedback when you're on the "paper" and not.

How about writing in the large - I am thinking big movements, like when writing on a marker board?

Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I just tried it (not with the leap hardware) - the inability to "lift up" off the paper without leaving the sensor zone is weird. No haptic feedback when you're on the "paper" and not.

How about writing in the large - I am thinking big movements, like when writing on a marker board?

Still need to lift the marker to separate the words. And to touch it back rather precisely so not to have the next word to be an inch below the first one.

Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#84
This is gonna be a pain in the arm for photoshoppers. But i'm interested to see this technology grow into popularity. I can't believe we're actually having something like this in our time. 20 years ago, you can only see stuff like these in science fiction novels and movies.

Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#86

I’d love to get one of these and play with it. Will the SDK and spec for talking to it be freely available after the initial batch of preorders and free dev kits? As a counterexample, Emoviv gave a TED talk a while ago showing off a headset that lets you control your computer with your mind. When you visit their website you discover that you can only develop with a $500 “developer edition” headset that comes with a s…

Dev Kits ship for free to 20,000 developers in 1-3 months.

Pre-orders are for consumers at $70 and ship this winter.

The idea is to give all the hackers maximum access to create awesome apps and then deliver a healthy shiny ecosystem to the consumer. Also, we'd like to see a larger shift towards people creating things, so encouraging early adopters to get aboard the coding train is a positive trend.

It's a huge new interaction space, and we're looking for innovators to explore it!

Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#87
post #38

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out - but I can't see it being widely adopted in the home any time soon. People who want gesture based stuff will use Kinect. However, I can see this being huge in the commercial market. I can easily imagine using something like this in a shop, or for presentations at work.

I think you're spot on. Every mall in the developed world could have easy to use 3D maps and offer/advert displays - that's a huge market right there, whether or not the desktop ends up being one.

Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#88
post #49

Not to be cynical, but this reminds me a little of Alan Kay's comment: """ By the way, Sketchpad was the first system where it was discovered that the light pen was a very bad input device. The blood runs out of your hand in about 20 seconds, and leaves it numb. And in spite of that it’s been re-invented at least 90 times in the last 25 years. """ from http://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 around 7:10

I think there will be some things it's great at and some it's terrible at. Here's one for free: how about using this to create the Rosetta Stone of sign language? Or a portable sign-to-speech translator? (These are hard problems for other reasons, but this thing brings you a lot closer.) Think of it like this: Alan Kay isn't wrong, but you could say the same thing about any input. The mouse is a very bad input device…

(I like the idea of a pressure-sensitive keyboard. Could be useful for music. Probably hard to engineer in a way that would be useful and which wouldn't compromise button input. Blue-switch cherry keyboards are annoying to type on. Still, interesting idea.)

You're papering over the problems with relativism.

The keyboard is rapid to use and flexible. Although it has the possibility of physical health problems with RSI, with light pen interaction you have the certainty of pain and fatigue. Sign speakers don't need sign-to-speech - there are keyboards already. There's been multiple attempts at text to speech as well, and the result is more fiddly, less flexible and less rapid than you can get with a keyboard.

There could be an argument that keyboards are complicated and have a learning curve. But computers are the super-tool of our age. Why would you not learn use of a tool that gives you combines great power with flexibility.

I think we still have discussions about alternative user interfaces that hark back to the way humans interact with each other because most of the population are not yet expert keyboard users. This will change. Once the developed world is flush with expert keyboard users, user interfaces will go back to putting greater emphasis on them.

Re: Leap: A new gesture based interface for devices

#90

Not to be cynical, but this reminds me a little of Alan Kay's comment: """ By the way, Sketchpad was the first system where it was discovered that the light pen was a very bad input device. The blood runs out of your hand in about 20 seconds, and leaves it numb. And in spite of that it’s been re-invented at least 90 times in the last 25 years. """ from http://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 around 7:10

Shouldn't this be a problem with whiteboards/blackboards as well?

It seems to take less effort to press lightly against a surface than to keep your hand in relatively fixed, but unsupported, area.

(sample size of one: myself)

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