Get updates on the future of VR/AR:

  FILTERS:      Art & Design      Education      Explorations      Gaming      Hardware      Medical      Music      Orion      Unity      Unreal      UX Design      VR/AR   

Physical interaction design for VR starts with fundamentally rethinking how objects should behave. Click To TweetWhen you reach out and grab a virtual object or surface, there’s nothing stopping your physical hand in the real world. To make physical interactions in VR feel compelling and natural, we have to play with some fundamental assumptions about how digital objects should behave. The Leap Motion Interaction Engine handles these scenarios by having the virtual hand penetrate the geometry of that object/surface, resulting in visual clipping.

With our recent interaction sprints, we’ve set out to identify areas of interaction that developers and users often encounter, and set specific design challenges. After prototyping possible solutions, we share our results to help developers tackle similar challenges in your own projects.

Read More ›

As mainstream VR/AR input continues to evolve – from the early days of gaze-only input to wand-style controllers and fully articulated hand tracking – so too are the virtual user interfaces we interact with. Slowly but surely we’re moving beyond flat UIs ported over from 2D screens and toward a future filled with spatial interface paradigms that take advantage of depth and volume.

Last week, Barrett Fox described his process in pushing the new Graphic Renderer and the Interaction Engine’s Hover callbacks to their limits by creating a kinetic sculpture with tons of tweakable input parameters. Today I’ll detail my exploration of several ways spatial UIs could be used to control aspects of that sculpture – or any piece of complex content – by creating a playful set of physical-like user interfaces.

Read More ›

Last time, we looked at how an interactive VR sculpture could be created with the Leap Motion Graphic Renderer as part of an experiment in interaction design. With the sculpture’s shapes rendering, we can now craft and code the layout and control of this 3D shape pool and the reactive behaviors of the individual objects.

The Leap Motion Interaction Engine provides the foundation for hand-centric VR interaction design. Click To TweetBy adding the Interaction Engine to our scene and InteractionBehavior components to each object, we have the basis for grasping, touching and other interactions. But for our VR sculpture, we can also use the Interaction Engine’s robust and performant awareness of hand proximity. With this foundation, we can experiment quickly with different reactions to hand presence, pinching, and touching specific objects. Let’s dive in!

Read More ›

With the next generation of mobile VR/AR experiences on the horizon, our team is constantly pushing the boundaries of our VR UX developer toolkit. Recently we created a quick VR sculpture prototype that combines the latest and greatest of these tools.

Learn how to optimize your #VR project for the next generation of mobile VR experiences. Click To TweetThe Leap Motion Interaction Engine lets developers give their virtual objects the ability to be picked up, thrown, nudged, swatted, smooshed, or poked. With our new Graphic Renderer Module, you also have access to weapons-grade performance optimizations for power-hungry desktop VR and power-ravenous mobile VR.

In this post, we’ll walk through a small project built using these tools. This will provide a technical and workflow overview as one example of what’s possible – plus some VR UX design exploration and performance optimizations along the way.

Read More ›

Explorations in VR Design is a journey through the bleeding edge of VR design – from architecting a space and designing groundbreaking interactions to making users feel powerful.

Sound is essential for truly immersive VR. It conveys depth and emotion, builds and reinforces interactions, and guides users through alien landscapes. Combined with hand tracking and visual feedback, sound even has the power to create the illusion of tactile sensation.

In this Exploration, we’ll explore the fundamentals of VR sound design, plus take a deep dive into the auditory world of Blocks. Along the way, we’ll break a few laws of physics and uncover the surprising complexity of physical sound effects.

Explore our latest XR guidelines →

Read More ›

Explorations in VR Design is a journey through the bleeding edge of VR design – from architecting a space and designing groundbreaking interactions to making users feel powerful.

Explore our latest XR guidelines →

Art takes its inspiration from real life, but it takes imagination (and sometimes breaking a few laws of physics) to create something truly human. With last week’s Leap Motion Interaction Engine 1.0 release, VR developers now have access to unprecedented physical interfaces and interactions – including wearable interfaces, curved spaces, and complex object physics.

These tools unlock powerful interactions that will define the next generation of immersive computing, with applications from 3D art and design to engineering and big data. Here’s a look at Leap Motion’s design philosophy for VR user interfaces, and what it means for the future.

Read More ›

As humans, we are spatial, physical thinkers. From birth we grow to understand the objects around us by the rules that govern how they move, and how we move them. These rules are so fundamental that we design our digital realities to reflect human expectations about how things work in the real world.

At Leap Motion, our mission is to empower people to interact seamlessly with the digital landscape. This starts with tracking hands and fingers with such speed and precision that the barrier between the digital and physical worlds begins to blur. But hand tracking alone isn’t enough to capture human intention. In the digital world there are no physical constraints. We make the rules. So we asked ourselves: How should virtual objects feel and behave?

We’ve thought deeply about this question, and in the process we’ve created new paradigms for digital-physical interaction. Last year, we released an early access beta of the Leap Motion Interaction Engine, a layer that exists between the Unity game engine and real-world hand physics. Since then, we’ve worked hard to make the Interaction Engine simpler to use – tuning how interactions feel and behave, and creating new tools to make it performant on mobile processors.

Today, we’re excited to release a major upgrade to this tool kit. It contains an update to the engine’s fundamental physics functionality and makes it easy to create the physical user experiences that work best in VR. Because we see the power in extending VR and AR interaction across both hands and tools, we’ve also made it work seamlessly with hands and PC handheld controllers. We’ve heard from many developers about the challenge of supporting multiple inputs, so this feature makes it easier to support hand tracking alongside the Oculus Touch or Vive controllers.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the new features and functions in the Interaction Engine.

Read More ›

Creating a sense of space is one of the most powerful tools in a VR developer’s arsenal. In our Exploration on World Design, we looked at how to create moods and experiences through imaginary environments. In this Exploration, we’ll cover some key spatial relationships in VR, and how you can build on human expectations to create a sense of depth and distance.

Explore our latest XR guidelines →

Read More ›

Explorations in VR Design is a journey through the bleeding edge of VR design – from architecting a space and designing groundbreaking interactions to making users feel powerful.

Explore our latest XR guidelines →

Stories are how we make sense of the world. One of the most effective ways to draw a user into any experience you build is to provide a story. Just ask yourself three questions: (1) What is the user doing? (2) Why are they doing it? (3) And how will they discover what “matters,” i.e. what’s worth doing?

Much of the narrative behind an experience will be told in the first few seconds, as the user becomes accustomed to the scene. The world and sound design should all reinforce a core narrative – whether you want to give your user the powers of a god, make them feel tiny, or build an emotional connection with a lonely hedgehog.

Read More ›

Explorations in VR Design is a journey through the bleeding edge of VR design – from architecting a space, to designing groundbreaking interactions, to making users feel powerful.

Virtual reality is a world of specters, filled with sights and sounds that offer no physical resistance when you reach towards them. This means that any interactive design with hands in VR has to contend with a new version of one of the world’s oldest paradoxes. What happens when an unstoppable force (your hand) meets an imaginary digital object?

Explore our latest XR guidelines →

Read More ›