Control your Mac--without a mouse!
The computer mouse has been around since 1963, and has enjoyed almost ubiquitous use by computer owners around the world ever since. But if San Francisco-based startup Leap Motion has its way, the iconic input tool will soon be little more than a museum piece. The company plans on launching what it calls a Leap 3D motion control system--a revolutionary new way for computer users to physically interact with their computers.
Rather than control a computer via an input device, the Leap allows users to manipulate their operating system and software through a real-time motion tracking system that can map the movements of all of your fingers, hands, a pencil, and other similar objects with a level of accuracy that puts devices like Microsoft’s Kinect to shame. As Leap Motion’s CEO Michael Buckwald explains, the breakthrough technology required to make the Leap’s magic happen was years in the making.
The invention began with Leap Motion’s co-founder and CTO, David Holz. About six years ago, Holz was utilizing a computer modeling program when he realized that something with as simple of a shape as a coffee cup requires a high degree of technical skill—and takes a lot of time—to model on a computer. “The limitation wasn’t that the computer didn’t have the processing power necessary to create a model of a coffee cup, and it wasn’t that he didn’t know what he wanted the coffee cup to look like,” explains Buckwald. “It was this barrier between man and device. That’s when [Holz] started thinking about ways of making it better and easier for people to interact with computers, and that’s how the underlying technology in the Leap came about.” After many years of mathematical research and breakthroughs, Buckwald and Holz were led to something that could finally track ten fingers with a tremendous amount of accuracy.
Sometimes a big deal comes in a small package.
The Leap is a candy bar-sized USB-powered device that plugs in to your Mac and uses high fidelity infrared LEDs to track the movements of your hands, including all ten of your fingers and anything they happen to be holding. The data mined from your movements is translated into interface commands that an Apple or Windows computer can understand and turn into actions like controlling your cursor, scrolling up and down a webpage, zooming in to a document, or firing off a gun in a first-person shooter. What’s even more interesting is that all of this is made possible by some old-school computing technology that we’ve taken for granted for years. “When you take your Leap out, plug it in, and install the software, you are interfacing with existing protocols like touch, stylus, mouse, and keyboard,” says Buckwald. “We’re using these legacy protocols to build a backward-compatible interaction where the user can interface with existing applications right out of the box without any special software.” In addition to the Leap’s basic interface software, the device will ship with an application discovery platform. Users will be able to cycle through apps and products that developers have built, such as dynamic ways to explore the internet or new methods for engineers to interact with 3D models.
Leap Motion’s yen for leveraging legacy technology to make its forward-thinking hardware purr extends into other areas as well. You don’t need a recent-model computer to use the device, since it only uses approximately 1 to 2 percent of a machine’s processing power. As the Leap’s processing demands are so minimal, users will be able connect it to systems up to five years old. This backward compatibility could make Leap an attractive purchase for computer users in niche industries, who have traditionally been slow to upgrade their computers. The medical industry, for instance, tends to lean toward reliable, time-tested systems instead of bleeding-edge hardware. By pairing those older computer systems with a Leap, doctors will be able to realize new levels of productivity—a surgeon operating on a patient could conceivably use a computer to look up a piece of crucial information or consult with a colleague in the middle of a procedure without having to remove his gloves. In other industries, computer-wielding artists could sculpt and work with their creations in ways that they never could with a mouse or stylus, and engineers will be able to work in 3D to solve design problems, virtually holding and manipulating the objects they’re creating in their hands.
The Leap's infrared sensors can accurately detect the movement of your hands to within one hundredth of a millimeter.
What’s more, the device’s built-in functionality will no doubt be augmented by new software created with the Leap in mind. While Buckwald wasn’t willing to divulge any of Leap Motion’s launch partners, he did speak to what he felt the future had in store for the device. “I think that the biggest thing that isn’t in place right now is a lot of great software for users to take advantage of the interaction with,” he says. “There’s a lot we can do through touch and backward compatibility, like zooming, scrolling, clicking, and moving things. All of that is great, but the most exciting things are the things that the developers are going to build from the ground up that take advantage of the 3D nature of the interaction we’re enabling. They’ll be grabbing, moving, rotating, and picking up. All of those concepts don’t really exist in software that’s popular today.”
It’s a science fiction and computer geek’s dream come true.
sbstrum
July 24, 2012 at 9:48pm
What our country needs are those with vision who are creative and innovative i.e., it's crenovation. Leap 3D sounds truly exciting and I can't wait to test it out. I still believe that every device we use be it computer or IOS should have easier ways for us to input "whatever", be it our hands inputing information or our voice. I look forward to seeing what such crenovators can do.
