We’ll begin shipping pre-orders of the Leap Motion Controller this week, with delivery to begin July 22.
Before we ship, our billing partner, ModusLink, has begun authorizing credit cards. By the end of the week, our pre-order customers will be billed for their order. The charge will be seen as ModusLink for Leap Motion (or some potential variation depending on your bank).
The Leap Motion hardware is deceptively simple – two infrared cameras and three LEDs, encased in a shell of glass and aluminum. However, as Leap Motion industrial designer Kyle Hay showed on our blog, our hardware is really a labor of love and years of development. We recently asked three of our hardware engineers about their work, experiences, and vision for the future of Leap Motion technology.
We’ve seen how hardware, software, and graphics constraints can all work to produce latency. Now it’s time to put them all together, and ask what we can take away from this analysis.
The best way to illustrate the impacts of these different factors is to look at their respective contributions under different scenarios. These measurements are averages across a few different machines, so performance on your machine in particular can be better or worse than these numbers.
Latency is an important factor in making any human interface feel right. The Leap Motion Controller has lower latency than other similar products on the market, but exactly how low is it? The honest answer is that it depends on quite a few different variables, some of which are often overlooked.
We’ve learned from empirical evidence in building and testing motion control systems that there is some amount of latency that is tolerable by the human visual and nervous system, in that the delay is still imperceptible. This line is fuzzy and changes from person to person, but we’ve found that a good threshold is around 30 milliseconds on average.
In less than 2 weeks we’re shipping the Leap Motion Controller to more than 150 countries around the world. Amy Purvis, our Supply Chain Coordinator, has been a huge part of the Leap Motion team as one of our first 10 employees.
Although she’s always moving full steam ahead, Amy took some time this week to answer a few questions about getting the Leap Motion Controller out to the world. She also shared some photos she took from a visit to one of our distribution centers.
Today, we’re happy to announce our Developer Portal is open to the world. Anyone can now register for free as a Leap Motion developer to gain full access to the Leap Motion SDK and become a member of our developer community.
When creating new demos for the Leap Motion Controller, the first question I tend to ask myself is: ‘How can I create something that was not possible to make before?’ This line of thought tends to lead me to a place of wondering how I can make a spaceship that lets me wing suit base jump on the moons of Jupiter, but sometimes it just makes me want to create a demo. One of the things that really excites me about the Leap Motion Controller is the extra dimension of interaction, especially when it pertains to 3D objects.
All of this made me decide to create a program that let you manipulate the mesh of a sphere. If you have a Leap Motion Controller, the program is available at cabbibo.com/leap/meshGallery
As many people who I’ve talked to who are programming with the Leap Motion Controller have told me, one of the bigger issues that you have to solve is how to start and stop a motion. In the case of mesh manipulation this is especially difficult, because the way that you begin or end a motion cannot affect the placement of the vertex you are moving.
In the end there were a few things I did to try and solve this problem.
The first was to make it so that the ‘plucker’ which would attach itself to a vertex, would be a point that lay directly in the middle of the two ‘finger markers’, as seen in the screen shot below.
This lets you see the point that attaches to the objects, and also means that when you move the ‘plucker’ over a vertex, it will automatically attach to the object. I have found this to be especially useful because we as humans kind of suck at 3D (or at the very least aren’t good at telling depth on a 2D screen) This means that doing something like ‘intersect the object, then click’ becomes even more difficult because to have to overcome two obstacles, rather then just one.
Once you have attached to the object, you get to feel the true power of the Leap Motion Controller. You get to effortlessly move the vertex around in a dimension that literally was impossible to interact with before. The first time I got this to work, it was an experience that only the likes of Gandalf or Merlin could begin to comprehend. I was moving in a whole new dimension, and if felt good. It literally felt like I was interacting with the computer, and it knew something that it never had before: the Z-Axis.
That being said, there still was the problem of letting go of the object. In the end I ended up going with the event ‘when the last frame has two fingers and this frame has less then two fingers’ to trigger the release of the vertex. However, even with the specificity of this event, there are still multiple ways a user could trigger it. Do they put 2 fingers in the field, and then wildly move them away? This obviously won’t work, because then every vertex would follow the fingers to the edge of the field, making for a pretty ugly mesh. Also they could place two fingers in the field, and curl one of them until it is no longer read, but this would make the average ‘plucker’ point follow the curled finger, and move the vertex.
What I ended up saying is: ‘Make a ‘V’ with your fingers to grab a point, and to let go, close the ‘V’ your fingers make’. This seems to work pretty well, and I am able to create some pretty interesting shapes
Going forward, I would love to experiment more using the hand position as the stable point, so that I can wiggle my fingers all I want without affecting the point of the vertex, but that is something for another experiment!
As we get ready to ship the Leap Motion Controller out to the world in July, we’re making sure each one goes to the right place. Things might have changed since you placed your pre-order — maybe you’ve moved, or maybe your payment information has changed or expired. We don’t want anything to keep you from getting your device next month.