Hands on with Leap Motion's gestural interface

Niall Firth, technology editor

I'm slicing and dicing my way through melons as if my life depends on it, every twitch of my finger dispatching another pile of soft fruit. This is Fruit Ninja as it has never been played before - using the Leap, the much-hyped gestural control device made by start-up firm Leap Motion that is set to launch worldwide in March.

The device itself is a small box, just 8 centimetres long, which contains infrared cameras that can track each finger independently at an accuracy of 1/100th of a millimetre. It creates an invisible 3D box above the device in which your fingers are tracked 290 times per second.

Teaser videos have confirmed the Leap's status as The Next Big Thing and, now that software developers have had a chance to get their hands on it and give their feedback, it is due to launch worldwide.

Is it worth the hype? Yes: the accuracy with which it tracks each finger is extraordinary and it is easy to see why people are heralding it as the device that will kill off the mouse once and for all. There is no perceptible lag between a flick of your fingers and its onscreen counterpart. The closely guarded secret of how Leap is able to do this lies in the software that processes the input from the Leap box, which was designed by Leap Motion's co-founder David Holz, an ex-NASA scientist.

For my demonstration, Michael Zagorsek, the firm's head of product marketing, sets me up with the Leap box and connects it to a laptop via USB 3.0 cable. I start by exploring a 3D matrix, designed to show off Leap's impressive precision. By zooming in, I am able to trace around the edge of a 1-centimetre square on the screen, coffee jitters notwithstanding. Each finger is tracked and shown in a different colour. Another visualisation app lets me stir up eddies of foaming colour on the screen with a wiggle of my fingers.

It's clever and intuitive stuff - but what's it going to be used for? When consumers finally get their hands on Leap it will come with an app store of its own with up to 100 apps, ranging from games (Fruit Ninja fans, you are likely to be pleased) to art and design as well as a music creation apps, such as Air Harp (see video above). Many more will come once it is rolled out, says Zagorsek. Leap is not ruling out any markets, from gaming to education, from military to medical - just like Microsoft's Kinect, but on a completely different level of precision.

Zagorsek says that in the future Leap can be shrunk so it could be built into tablets or smartphones. On its own, it will cost $70.

"It allows you to compute in a way you have never done before," says Zagorsek. "Our goal is to evolve computing." Big talk, perhaps, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/276af6d1/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A130C0A10Chands0Eon0Ewith0Eleap0Emotion0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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