Starting today, the Leap Motion Controller is now available for purchase at Newegg.com. The leading online electronics retailer in the US, Newegg.com is a popular destination for gamers and tech fans. To kick off the launch, all Newegg.com purchases of the Leap Motion Controller by October 11 will receive a free download of GameWAVE.
Are you ready to turn up the volume with a spin of your finger? Browse web pages and documents with a hand tilt? Check out HandWAVE, the latest computer control app now available in the Airspace Store. Free for Mac and Windows, HandWAVE is a simple, intuitive gesture-based app that runs in the background so it’s always available.
Over the past two months, I’ve been impressed with the variety and creativity of Leap Motion-enabled applications we’re seeing in Airspace, as well as the responses we’ve received from our users. We’ve been listening and one thing our users want more of is – wait for it – consistency! Especially when it comes to application menu systems.
Menus may be the last part of your app experience that you want to think about, but it should be the first. It’s going to be the first thing that a user will see – if they don’t have a good user experience right away, they may not go deeper into your app. The menu should set the tone for the rest of the experience.
The following are a few best practices to keep in mind as you begin to design and develop your app experience.
However you organize your menu to accommodate your experience and artwork, always keep the usability, legibility, and simplicity of interaction in mind. Be sure to space the buttons appropriately so that it’s easy for a user to select and tap a particular button without accidentally mis-tapping another.
In this example menu you can see a number of best practices at work.
Another way of simplifying the menu experience for your users is to provide a proximity-based highlighting scheme. This highlights the closest item to the user’s cursor, without having to actually be over it. In the example below, the five possible actions are outlined to show how this might work.
The user’s cursor is in the upper left quadrant, so therefore the Play button is lit. Performing a tap gesture would activate the Play button. Anticipating what the user might want in these contexts can save time and eliminate frustration.
With this in mind, accessing these menus as well as exiting your application should be handled in the same manner – simple and foolproof.
Above: The first-person shooter, Dead Motion: Prologue, displays this simple menu when a user removes their hands from the field of view.
For any selection approach you utilize, giving users proper cues and feedback is integral to ensuring they feel in complete control. It should be immediately clear which elements are interactive – and it never hurts to give users unobtrusive graphical or textual cues, e.g. a simple illustration and “Tap to select an article.”
Once interacting with the element, it should respond fluidly with appropriate visual and auditory feedback. Buttons should be highlighted when hovered over, and respond with a “click” and indent as they are depressed; sliders should move freely; etc. The more information you can give to help orient the user and signal their selections, the easier it will be for them to complete each task.
Above: Frog Dissection uses large buttons that highlight and magnify when indicated and the Leap Motion Touch Zone API to handle the button “tap.”
(For more on the implementation of the Touch Zone API, please review this section of our documentation and this excellent blog post from one of our developers.)
I hope that you find these examples and best practices helpful as you create your application user experience. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting more best practices on Developer Labs. Let us know what you think, and what you’d like to see next. I’m looking forward to hearing from you and seeing more of your great work.
Jon Altschuler is the Director of Creative Technology at Leap Motion.
This week in the Airspace Store, we’re continuing our proud tradition of introducing apps with the word “air” in the title, with a new experimental effect generator and an OS control app for Mac. Plus, we take a look at 5 other titles in the Airspace Store that lend a certain “atmosphere” to our app store.
We’re always amazed at what our developers can build – especially when they combine the Leap Motion Controller with other technologies in new and exciting ways. From lasers and projectors to 3D models and glass panels, here are 7 videos of cool experiments that take Leap Motion control beyond the desktop. If you’ve created or seen other cool videos with Leap Motion, please share them in the comments.
Today on the Leap Motion blog, we’ve featured 7 visual experiments created by our developer community. Last week, we caught up with creative developer Rom, who designed the interactive LED wall and architectural model in the videos below.
The Leap Motion Controller allows users to interact with architectural models ‘organically,’ pointing out areas of interest as they would do naturally. Touchless or not, the beauty is that the user consults the detail of the model itself to source more information, not an iPad app or touchscreen. It makes for a truly intuitive input device, almost completely hidden away.
Being able to build a touchless system without a huge budget or timeframe is certainly a first.
A small but profound advantage is that the Leap Motion Controller passes coordinates in true distances, making it easy to accurately map the surface of a model in respect to the device. Just jot down the dimensions from the model’s CAD files and offset it against the Leap Motion Controller’s origin.
It will most certainly open new business opportunities to retrofit older installations and projects with minimal adjustments/disruption. In terms of architectural models, it’s now the weapon of choice for smaller models (within the scope of the device’s Y-axis), especially for projects with a tight budget or future-hungry clients. An accompanying screen to display relevant information – and the project has all it needs.
While it’s not my line of work, I’d love to see people exploring real-time 3D graffiti and sculptures within LED matrices. The Leap Motion Controller has certainly opened a lot of doors – not just with lighting, but hardware in general.
On Friday, a preview of Peter Molyneux’s new game, Godus, became available on Steam Early Access. The godfather of god games, Molyneux is also the designer of Populous and Black & White. Since we announced the Leap Motion Controller, we’ve heard from lots of people excited about using it to play Black & White, so we’ve followed the development of Godus since the start of its Kickstarter campaign last year.