Leap Motion first impressions: There's work to do

After more than a year of hype and some impressive canned demos, Leap Motion is finally here.
The $79 motion controller for Windows and Mac is available for purchase, and its app store is up and running. I've been playing with a Leap unit provided by the company since last Thursday.

It's hard not to be impressed with Leap Motion on a basic level. Here's a motion controller that's more precise than Microsoft's Kinect, for a fraction of the cost, in a package small enough to sit discretely on a desk. Although Leap doesn't have a video camera like Kinect, it's able to detect the motion of individual fingers.

But is it practical, and does it work as well as it looked in all the promo videos we've seen over the last year? That's where things get a little messy.

Leap Motion's Airspace Home is used to launch most of 

LM's roster of promising, if inconsistent apps.

  Leap's biggest problem is inconsistency in the quality and behavior of its apps, which for the most part are launched through an app hub dubbed “Airspace Home.” Some apps, such as Corel's Painter Freestyle and Leap's own Touchless mouse control app, use a 3D vertical plane to register input. Move your finger beyond that plane, and it's as if you're clicking with a mouse. This works terribly in practice because you have no physical feedback for when your finger has crossed the plane. In Painter, it's too difficult to control when you're actually drawing, and in Touchless, it's too easy to accidentally click on things.

Touchless, for that matter, is somewhat disappointing as a mouse supplement. While it'd be nice to use the app for leaning back and reading through Web pages, scrolling can be tough to initiate in an accurate and predicable way. The app also doesn't support multiple monitors.

Photoscape is one of the few apps that uses
the technology to its advantage.

  Other apps handle input better. Photoscape, a stylish viewer for online photo sources like Instagram and Flickr, uses a quick point gesture to simulate a mouse click, and uses hand swipes to scroll through menus. Additional navigation is based on the position of your hand in 3D space. The app is intuitive and fun, and doesn't run into issues with accidental input.

The big takeaway here is that Leap and its developers have a lot of work to do on making motion controls as consist as possible. One size doesn't need to fit all, but Leap still needs to figure out what works, and prescribe some best practices for app developers. The idea of passing some arbitrary vertical plane to initiate input needs to be thrown out entirely for apps where accuracy is key.

Leap's other big challenge is to come up with some must-have apps for the device. Right now, the collection consists mostly of games or silly diversions, with wildly varying degrees of quality. Some of these games are enjoyable enough—Double Fine's Dropchord being the most notable example—but they don't make a very strong case for PC motion controllers. For this kind of entertainment, you'd be better off in the living room with Kinect.

That's not say there aren't any useful apps available. Unlock is a quick and easy way to log in to Windows with biometric authentication, and for Mac users, Swish provides simple gesture controls such as app switching and volume adjustments. There's also a surprisingly robust selection of MIDI control apps for musicians.

At the moment, though, Leap doesn't provide any truly compelling reasons to get on board. At $79, it's basically something you might buy if you're interested in motion controls, and want to see where the technology goes. It should be fun to watch Leap's journey continue, even if the product isn't ready to be part of your daily computing life. 

Leap Motion Opens Airspace App Store Beta, But the Hardware Is Still Delayed

 

 

Remember the Leap Motion, the movement-sensing hardware device that was going to change the world? Well, it was supposed to arrive in May and promptly blow all of our minds, but it’s still not here yet.

 

However, the gesture-tracking platform is at least one hand-swipe closer to reality. Leap Motion, the company that makes the hardware controller of the same name, is rolling out its developer portal and SDK to the public this week.

 

The tiny trackers themselves won’t ship until July 22, but this week’s software release should help get developers up to speed on how to code for the hardware before the controllers finally ship. Any developers who sign up for the beta program will get the Leap Motion SDK, as well as access to the developer web portal.

 

Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald told me that there are only a few beta items in the app store for now, mostly because developers who have access to the hardware haven’t finished their apps yet, but also because some developers who do have the sensors and have finished their apps have chosen to remain secretive and keep their work under wraps until the hardware debuts.

 

This week’s release also doesn’t mean the company will be releasing more of its devices to developers, Buckwald says. By releasing the beta SDK, more developers will be clued in to the Leap Motion’s specific capabilities, and the web forum will give them the opportunity to talk with other devs who already have the device. This new crop of developers in the developer portal will still have to wait until the Leap Motion ships on July 22.

 

When I interviewed Buckwald at the company’s office in San Francisco, I got to play with the Leap Motion again. And it’s still awesome.

 

Announced last year, the Leap Motion gesture-based controller has already attracted some very big name developers. It’s been adopted by Google for navigation of Google Earth. Asus is testing it for use in the company’s all-in-ones and laptops, and HP is planning on using it to add gesture capabilities to its consumer PCs later this year.

 

Even with all the interest, the device maker has hit more than a few bumps. The initial ship date of May 13 was pushed back to July 22. Buckwald says his company pushed the release back in order to do some more comprehensive testing, the fruits of which have made their way into today’s beta released.

 

So, fingers crossed for tons of hand-waving come the end of July.

 

Update: An earlier version of this article reported that the Airspace app store was available as part of this week’s opening of the SDK and developer portal. The Airspace app store is only available to the initial 10,000 developers that have already been granted access to beta program.