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// Leap Motion Team

It’s been a busy month on the Leap Motion Twitch TV channel! With our 3D Jam Let’s Play! coming up on Wednesday, we thought we’d highlight our recent tutorial and Q&A sessions, which are now available on YouTube.

At the top of the post, you can watch as we build a mock application live, incorporating lessons we’ve learned about UX/UI design for 3D space. Topics range from creating slick menu systems, to the art of robust interaction design, to the intricacies of “immersion,” and beyond.

Ever feel like destroying everything around you? As developers push to release their early builds for today’s 3D Jam milestone, we thought we’d spotlight one of our earliest #ScreenshotSaturday submitters. Inspired by the classic arcade game Rampage, LabCoat Studios’ Mega Creature Smash is an over-the-top action game all about destruction and revenge.

The choice of hand design can fundamentally make or break user experience. As a developer, a hyper-realist render in your trippy space shooter might be an intergalactic buzzkill. Conversely, if your user is playing a general in a WWII bunker, you might want to lean more human than cyborg. Hand Viewer, a brand-new release in our Examples Gallery, gives you an arsenal of onscreen hands to experiment with as you build new desktop experiences with Leap Motion.

The average human brain weighs about three pounds. Picture three pounds of bees encased in your skull, buzzing out of your ears. You’re welcome. Thankfully, Select 3D Jam Team Three Pounds of Bees has no intention of inducing gamers into this nightmare scenario. Rather, their goal is to bring the power of pollination to your fingertips.

One of the great appeals of motion control is that it gives us an enormous feeling of power and control over our digital environment. But what if someone took that control away from you? For their Select 3D Jam submission, Chad Toprak and Yang Ho are developing a unique two-player experience for the Oculus Rift – dualcyon, a blind co-op puzzle experience.

Inspired by the classic arcade game Out Run, the upcoming 3D Jam submission Ferrari Cops brings a new spin on an old favorite. Along with fast-paced gameplay and challenging courses, it also features the ability to blitz through the streets and control guns with your fingers.

This week, as the global 3D Jam’s Open track continues to heat up, the 16 teams chosen at IndieCade 2014 have been hard at work building 3D experiences for the Select track. One of the teams competing for more than $75,000 in cash and prizes is Lazy 8 Studios with Rhythm Red Alert.

Mozilla WebVR + Leap Motion interaction

How pervasive will virtual reality be? VR has the power to fundamentally transform the way we learn, play, share and even browse the web. Mozilla’s recent experiments combining VR and the web pave a path towards virtual presence – pushing beyond disconnected feelings of immersion and bringing us into new places with a life of their own.

Ever wondered how a subatomic particle feels as it accelerates through the supercollider on the road to annihilation? From the developer behind Kyoto and Lotus, Collider is a new audiovisual experience that takes you on a journey through a psychedelic vortex of light and sound. Now featuring full head-mounted support for the Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2, Collider brings together raw infrared imagery with full 3D immersion – and it’s available free on the Leap Motion App Store.

San Francisco is a city fueled by the Cloud, both literally and figuratively. Karl, you’re great – the bearded mystic that keeps a spring in our step and a song in our hearts – but distance makes the heart grow fonder! So we went down to Los Angeles this weekend for IndieCade to kick off our global 3D Jam. We hit the ground running on Friday with V2 demos for both desktop and virtual reality.