LEAP Motion : playing Blue Estate Prologue (FREE) and Gone Home

LEAP Motion had the finest independent hardware launch of recent times, bypassing all the kickstarter and celeb hype treadmills and reaching out to developers and users alike directly. As as result I have been LEAPing for free, far in advance of getting my hands on the retail units I now use... 0 stress ... if only more products launched this way outside of kickstarter.. 

Any how ...the LEAP is real, retail and it's usage is  evolving all the time ... by this I mean I find new uses for it every day along with developers ... who are beginning to point (sorry) out how LEAP is different to all the other so called motion controllers...

For a limited time, Blue Estate Prologue ( no it is not a car simulator but a comedy LEAP Motion controlled shooter based on the Eisner Awards nominated Blue Estate comic books from Viktor Kalvachev ..) is free on the Airspace App Store. This is how it plays using a siliconmicrodisplay ST1080 hmd at 1080p native res ...

For several months I have used Dangermouse and the LEAP to interface with my desktop/game ..lately though I have been taking to Touchless ... another free AIRSPACE app . How useful something like Touchless is going to depend on your skill with it ..

Touchless is work in progress, which holds true for many LEAP apps...but we can already use it in retail PC games and combine it with other VR leaning control UIs like head tracking :

    

The retail LEAP does not heat up the way the dev unit did, has a funky new USB lead and can and does show it's potential to  revolutionise the way we interface with cyberspace ... 

There are a couple of nagging issues though.... first and foremost user fatigue ... that is the major limiting factor at present in mass uptake of the LEAP Motion ...

Tom Cruise could wave his hands around for a minute or two in Minority report, but what  happens when you have to do that all day, or in a 6 hour game of League of Legends ...?

In practise you can start to feel fatigue within a few minutes of use. Hence the "rest your hands" notices in the Blue Estate Prologue video above ... 

Solving the fatigue issue, whether through training bad habits out of the user or using minimal hand or finger movement in game and doing without wild Kinect like gestures is the challenge ... 

But this is not the only barrier...

You can see me having to re "learn" to use Touchless in the above videos... for each of the different applications..whether an on rails native app like Blue Estate, or a legacy non LEAP optimised game like Gone Home.. 

The LEAP then is not the universal  "mouse" of our generation .. any one can pick up a mouse, every one will move it in the same way to achieve the same result  and expect to achieve that result every time.. your mouse  is a standard UI control technique...with a far more certain almost digital 0 1 outcome , you click that left mouse button and you get the same result every time ...  the LEAP depending on what app you use can be very different .. with Dangermouse I am just using one finger and thumb as a very fast mouse replacement , with Touchless I am using 5 fingers , with Google Earth we are using " fly to " gestures and hand positions ... each app then can have it's own learning curve....and depending on your skill you may or may not achieve that mouse click ...by touching the air ..it is not always 100% as it takes time to learn how to use it..and your hundredth click/LEAP gesture or your second or third click may not be perfect through fatigue or "imperfect" finger or hand movements ..  you can never physically move your hands or fingers exactly same way in repetition.. even getting them to approximate the same movement twice can be an issue ..and this is further compounded by the fatigue issue ..

There is also no standard, your fingers moving into and out of the screen may represent touch in one app, zooming in another and a right mouse click grab in yet another ...

To use the LEAP then, you have to train casual users .. or wait for them to "learn"  and to fully exploit LEAP Motion in your app as a developer you are going to have to counter user fatigue ..as well as adjust gestures to suit all skill levels..including less "digital" and more "analogue" or chaotic mapping of hand and finger gestures replacing traditional digital mouse/keyboard/joypad and on screen actions..

Altogether though the LEAP is the real deal, if you have any passing interest at all in VR or AR leaning UI control you should not hesitate in getting hold of one ...  or two as I have plans to replace all my WSAD and mouse duties with LEAP..more on that later...and yes there are ways to play with two LEAPs! 

Mass uptake and usage will require users and developers to re learn how they interface with all things digital ...exciting times as  you can see from the videos above we are not already getting closer to the scifi Hollywood prediction of motion control but we already done gone and passed it ...

There is far more substance to the LEAP Motion brand than certain other celeb and Kicstarter hyped products this is thanks to the way LEAP Motion have gone about engaging users and developers directly throughout the inception, testing and retail release of the product. The LEAP is a device that frequently surpasses my expectations and there are few if any other products these days I can say that about..

Oh and it works great with current head mounted displays like the smd ST1080 and head tracking solutions...

More to follow..  

  

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