It's been over a year since Leap Motion first publicly unveiled its idea for a gum-pack-sized motion tracker that promised sub-millimeter accuracy and easy finger tracking. I finally got a chance to try the promising technology at PAX East this weekend, and I've got to say it seems to deliver on that initial promise. The Leap Motion was hidden away in the Double Fine booth, where it was being shown alongside DropChord, a musical puzzle-action game designed specifically for the Leap Motion.
Using two index fingers, players point toward two dots on a hollow circle, creating a line through the middle that can be used to collect dots while avoiding painful sparks. After a short calibration, the Leap Motion tracked my fingers incredibly well, with none of the jumpiness and delay inherent in technologies like the Kinect. Picking out arcs with my outstretched index fingers quickly became second nature, and I was largely able to forget that the Leap Motion device was even there. It was like something out of Minority Report, as you can see in the video below.
Gaming Editor Kyle Orland goes hands-on with LeapMotion at PAX East 2013. (video link)The biggest problem with the controls was that my left hand would occasionally wander outside the detection area for the unit, and it would take me a second to realize the problem and reorient my hand. The Leap Motion also seemed to have a little trouble picking up the quick finger flicks that are supposed to send the arc whipping around the edge of the circle, but this is just as likely a software issue as a hardware problem.
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via http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/we-test-leap-motions-controller-free-gaming-and-find-it-finger-pointing-good/
