From building together in Google Hangouts to reimagining classic games, reach into the future with student projects from the PennApps hackathon. Plus, an Oculus Rift-enabled example that lets you beat up a dummy.

Also new this week, we have a library for AngularJS, playing piano and mixing beats in the air, and a huge virtual-reality battleship game. To subscribe to our developer newsletter and get updates through email, click here.

Developer Labs

Hangouts Hacking & Retro Gaming: PennApps 2014

3D real-time collaborative Google Hangouts. 8-bit Space Invaders in JavaScript. A virtual Bop-It straight outta the ‘90s. These are just a few of the amazing Leap Motion-enabled projects we saw at Penn Apps 2014.

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App Design and Finger Indexing with OpenSpace3D

Bastien Bourineau is back with example scenes and improved finger indexing for OpenSpace3D, an open-source platform for building 3D interactive environments and augmented reality apps. (Warning: Bastien beats the living daylights out of this poor dummy at 1:05. Not for the faint of heart.)

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On Developer Labs, you can find deep insights and technical perspectives on Leap Motion projects, natural user interfaces, and developer communities worldwide. Want to contribute a guest post? Submit your proposal.

Community Toolkit

Want to build your own single-page web app with Leap Motion interaction? Check out robinboehm’s AngularJS library.

Play Pong in your browser with mohamed-ahmed’s HTML5 game on GitHub.

To see the latest UI elements and sample code shared by the community, check out Community Libraries. You can share your code in the dev category on our community forums.

Highlights & Innovations

For his thesis at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts, Marco Zagaria created Air – three interactive works that use Leap Motion control. In the videos below, you can see an interactive installation and a virtuoso piano performance.

Frustrated with DJ setups where hand movements had no meaning, Christoph created a mixing platform where one hand controls which stem (kick, snare, hat, bass, lead, box) is being manipulated and the other hand changes, filters, loops or triggers the sample.

zaeran created a virtual-reality battleship for Oculus Rift with Leap Motion interaction. Check out an early interaction prototype and an untextured command ship (with cannon animations!) below.

Developer Events

SFHTML5 Meetup

Tuesday, February 25, 2014 @ 5:30 PM
Yelp, 140 New Montgomery, San Francisco, CA
Web developers are used to documenting functionality, but user interactions are often sadly neglected. Discover how your team can use the latest tools and conventions to design and document user interactions. But be quick! Registration closes in a few hours.

Register »

Space Invaders and Bop It are properties of Midway and Hasbro respectively.