This weekend, 100 developers, designers, and makers gathered at Apportable HQ to wrestle with ways we can use devices to hack into our neural pathways. From anxiety and panic suppression, to speed reading, to chair flying flight simulators, to mood bracelets, we saw some incredible projects produced over the course of two days – several of which artfully integrated Leap Motion technology.
Nowadays, just about everything has an API, from lightbulbs to needy toasters. While we’ve seen our fair share of drone hacks using JavaScript, what happens when your drone is controlled by a closed-end analog signal? Identify a widespread loophole in modern RC controllers, hijack the frequency, and map it to a Leap Motion Controller – whether the drone is intended to be controlled that way or not!
In the early stages of app development, the ability to listen and adapt to user feedback can be crucial. It’s been a few weeks since we last checked in with the LivePainter team, who want to change how we create animations with a motion-controlled in-browser platform. Based on feedback from their alpha users, they’re now working on a more streamlined version of their original vision – a super-easy experience that anyone can use, including more pre-made templates to help people get started.
With their project Animakeit! you’ll be able to add pre-created images and move them around within a scene using the Leap Motion Controller. The team hopes to inspire first-time animators to take the crucial first step, and play with the power of motion control in a fun new way.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about IoT is that everyday uses don’t always reveal themselves right away. Sometimes they need to be coaxed out. By experimenting at the edges of what’s possible with modern APIs, the hacker community gets to define those possible uses and parameters. At Hackendo, this past weekend’s wearables-and-externals IoT hackathon, I could see sparks flying everywhere – and you never know what might set the forest ablaze.
By Sunday afternoon, the teams at Hackendo were in full crunch mode. The hackathon had raged for two days, and now everyone was blitzing at the SF Techshop in SOMA to prep for 8PM demos and pitches. This was a room of people ready to break things and make things up as they went along. T-shirts with slogans like “Free Software Free Society” could be seen around the room.
Experimental headsets are changing how we see the world, either by creating the virtual worlds of our imaginations, like the Oculus Rift, or adding ghostly layers on top of the real world, like Google Glass. At the LEAP.AXLR8R, GetVu’s vision lies between these two extremes – an augmented reality platform where 3D models appear to exist in real space, amongst real objects.
Could physical therapy be fun, addictive, and stress-free? Last month, LEAP.AXLR8R founder Arvind Gupta showed how Ten Ton Raygun is gamifying the road to recovery for stroke and accident victims. Along with fellow AXLR8R developer Diplopia, they believe that motion control and game mechanics are a powerful combination in overcoming health issues.
In our latest spotlight video, Ten Ton Raygun founder Eric Medine talks about his dream to create his at-home physical therapy app. Since recovering stroke victims tend to tense up as they retrain their brains to perform everyday tasks, his goal is to create a tai chi-like gaming experience that helps users relax while they play.
Hack Reactor is a developer bootcamp where people become software engineers through live coding, real-world projects, and meetups. On March 28, Leap Motion’s senior developer Dave Edelhart and I were invited to present the Leap Motion Controller and Three.js.
Together with over 30 developers (both in training and from the wider San Francisco coding community), we went through a structured exercise to both build a Three.js fiddle and an interactive Three + Leap Motion example. We had a great time working with the students, and thought we’d share our examples! Here’s how you can make an interactive cube in Three.js (with full code samples and live demos on JSFiddle.)
The Internet of Things is different things to different people. In recent posts on Leap Motion’s Developer Labs, we’ve seen how the Leap Motion device can open up new interaction models in smart environments. To exist within the Internet of Things – to network with other devices in a smart ecosystem on a machine-to-machine (M2M) basis, rather than being just another human-machine interface (HMI) – that’s where it gets really interesting.
The sticky point is that if a system gets its data from direct human interaction, or its outputs go to direct human interaction, then it isn’t M2M, but HMI – the telling point being that the data does not get out beyond the machine to which the Leap Motion Controller is attached. There’s only the one “machine,” the system comprised of the computer with an attached peripheral.
But we’re talking about a device that generates data. If we move up one layer in the hierarchy, by looking instead at the data which is generated by the machine, and make that data available in the cloud, then the difference between HMI and M2M becomes irrelevant. By opening up the data to the cloud, the Leap Motion Controller and its attached computer is now clearly a M2M device and supports all of evolutionary, revolutionary and emergent behavior. You’re now talking about the integration of data clouds in ways that go much further than just HMI.
