VR has the power to transform our lives and connect us in new ways, while hand tracking lets you reach beyond the digital divide and take control. As part of our 3D Jam spotlight series, here are 17 utility demos that let you reach into a sea of data and extract its insights, explore a […]
// OS Interaction
Early last month, Leap Motion kicked off our internal hackathon with a round of pitch sessions. This basically involves everyone bouncing crazy ideas off each other to see which ones would stick. One of our tracking engineers suggested using our prototype Dragonfly module to augment a physical display with virtual widgets. Our team of five ran with this concept to create AR Screen.
You’ve probably heard the rest of the story. Our team’s video got shared on /r/oculus and led to a feature on Wired. While the Wired story focuses a lot on the experience side of things – the power of spatial thinking and offices of the future – it was light on the technical details. Since we’ve heard from a lot of VR developers interested in the project, I thought I’d do a deep dive here on the blog.
Hand tracking and virtual reality are both emerging technologies, and combining the two into a fluid and seamless experience can be a real challenge. This month, we’re exploring the bleeding edge of VR design with a closer look at our VR Best Practices Guidelines.
Jody Medich is a UX designer and researcher who believes that the next giant leap in technology involves devices and interfaces that can “speak human.” In this essay, she asks how a 3D user interface could transform how we explore and understand content – by giving our brains a whole new dimension of working memory.
At Leap Motion, we’ve been working on new resources to make developing VR/AR applications easier, including Widgets – fundamental UI building blocks for Unity. In part 3, Barrett talks about the strange physics bugs we encountered with Time Dial.
One of our new VR Widgets, the Time Dial, surprised (and indeed amused!) us at several special moments during our intense production push. The Time Dial Widget is our hand-enabled VR interpretation of a typical touch interface’s Date Picker. We built it with a combination of Wilbur Yu’s Widget interaction base, Daniel’s data-binding framework (more on those two later), and a graphic front-end that I coded and built – again using Unity’s new 3D GUI.
At Leap Motion, we’ve been working on new resources to make developing VR/AR applications easier, including Widgets – fundamental UI building blocks for Unity. In today’s Developer Diary, Widgets team product lead Andrew Littlefield previews Arm HUD, which puts information literally within arm’s reach.
At Leap Motion, we’re working to bring people and technology closer together by building a platform beyond the screen, designed for the original human interface – your hands. We’ve just taken another major step in this direction, with our V2 software pushed for free to devices around the globe.
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.
It’s no secret that for many developers in our community, midnight is the hour when the hacking gets good. Late last Friday night, over 1,000 undergraduates from across the country poured into California Memorial Stadium for Cal Hacks, a 36-hour coding spree put on by Major League Hacking. Sponsors ranging from tech’s biggest players to […]