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// Leap Motion Team

This year’s Vivid Sydney light, sound, and ideas festival saw the collision of two powerhouse Australian art collectives – Ethno Tekh and Enig’matik Records. Together they built Enigma’Tekh, a whirring system of massive technicolor projections coating the facade of Sydney University.

How we think about everyday objects is changing with accessible 3D printing, and new tools are emerging to make it easier to design and create just about anything you can imagine. Sculpteo and the Autodesk Gallery recently hosted a “Decoding 3D Printing” workshop to help hobbyists and professionals get up to speed in an afternoon. […]

For decades, motion controls have held a persistent place in our visions of the future. We’ve watched the super heroes, mad scientists, and space cowboys of popular media control digital experiences with just a wave of their hands. We’ve been captivated by these powerful, natural, and intuitive interactions; imagining what it would be like to […]

What is a city without its shops? Is it just an empty shell? How a team of developers in the Netherlands are fighting to draw attention to a dying retail street with an outdoor art installation.

Leap Motion art installation.

From art galleries and museums to retail centers and hackathons, the Leap Motion Controller can bring a little magic to interactive exhibits. Here’s a quick design guide to help installation artists and developers get started.

Old habits can be hard to break. When I’m building Leap Motion prototypes, I often find myself slipping into designing for cursors and touchscreens – paradigms based on one-handed interactions. By remembering to think outside the mouse, we can open ourselves up to interacting with virtual objects using both hands. But when are two-handed interactions the right approach?

Immersion is everything in a VR experience. Since your hands don’t actually float in space, we created a new Forearm API that tracks your physical arms. This makes it possible to create a more realistic experience with onscreen forearms.

Going from zero to 60 can feel exhilarating – but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can spell disaster. The same is true for first-time app users. Even with traditional interfaces, a clear and intuitive onboarding experience is important. For new interfaces like the Leap Motion Controller, it can be the difference between joy and frustration. The trick is to build an onramp – a starting experience where users can “speed up” to access the full functionality and interaction set.

The way we interact with technology is changing, and what we see as resources – wood, water, earth – may one day include digital content. At last week’s API Night at RocketSpace, Leap Motion CTO David Holz discussed our evolution over the past year and what we’re working on. Featured speakers and v2 demos ranged from Unity and creative coding to LeapJS and JavaScript plugins.

By learning how to play an instrument, musicians have the power to channel beauty and emotion through their hands. This makes music theory a ripe playground for 3D motion control experiments. If learning to play a physical instrument is a matter of learning how that object works and building muscle memory, why can’t learning chord progressions happen the same way – but in the air?