Gestures based actions are becoming increasingly commonplace in the Digital Age in which we live, and although a trackpad here, or a touchscreen there tends to help the job move along seamlessly, hardware manufacturers are constantly looking at ways to test the boundaries. In light of the success of 3D gestures in products such as Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect peripheral, a string of start-ups and established companies have looked to apply that same motif to computers, and Leap Motion’s soon-to-be-released offering not only looks amazing, but at $80, is certainly priced at the kind of bracket most can agree with.
Leap Motion’s minimalistic gesture control, which the company claims is 200 times more accurate than any similar product on the market, first made an appearance last May, and since then, developers have naturally been keen to get up close and personal with it. Since then, Leap has been working on ironing out the bugs and sorting the manufacturing process, and finally, it appears to be almost ready to hit the consumer market. The only thing better than its compact design and proclaimed pinpoint accuracy (to a hundredth of a millimeter, no less), is the price tag. At just $80, it is likely sell out very quickly when it finally does make it to market, with the company forecasting sales beginning in May.
The claim of being 200 times more accurate than anything else currently retailing is a bold statement, and while the proof of the pudding will of course be in testing it out for ourselves, the demonstration video below certainly appears to affirm to the boastful stat. It is said to be able to image all ten of your fingers, offers a 150-degree field of view, and at 290 fps. It can monitor a space of up to 4ft³ in size with devastating accuracy, and if you want to see it in action, check out this clip:
Support will be offered to Windows Vista, 7 or 8, as well as OS X 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion) from the get-go, and with some 12,000 devs having worked on this project in the last twelve months, it will be exciting to see what they’ve come up with. Confirmed offerings range from Cut The Rope (but, of course), to Autodesk and Corel, and Leap Motion will have its own Airspace App Store to facilitate these titles.
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