Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway98237 | Hacker News Reader

The original Leap Motion was awesome. But there was no adoption of it. It would have been great to see it included in laptops, for instance. Just my opinion, this is because, well, the same reason there are all sorts of arbitrary names for command line switches. The people that could build this already have something that works for them, so why spend time building out a whole new interface for other folks, average folks. Same reason why OSS has been great for programmers, not so great for consumers. Majority of the effort has gone to tooling and platforms, not to the non-technical user side of things.

View on HN

I was one of the pre-orderers for the original Leap Motion. I played around with making apps for it within the first few weeks.

It was pretty bad. I was fighting the API the whole time because its post-processed palm and finger positioning data was noisy and and error-prone, and it didn't have a raw mode. The API would frequently lose track of individual fingers. You also couldn't do any hand gestures that involved your palm pointing horizontally instead of up/down because it would lose track of your occluded fingers. It also had issues tracking fingers when you held them together (as if you were going to karate-chop something). It's just too many quirks to deal with if you're trying to do hand position and gesture input.

Maybe it's improved since then, but after one day back around the initial launch I basically gave up on the tech for hand tracking, deciding that it was just not a good approach.

I bought 5 I was so excited. I ended up selling 4 after realizing that they were gonna require more time than I'd expected. I need to go back and see if they've since improved their platform.

Head writer at Leap Motion here, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But it's like night and day.

What has changed?

It's clearly a much more mature company now, so I'm genuinely curious even if I had reasons to give up on the original device.

The software has gone through two successive generations, each a massive step up from the last.

I suppose I was hoping for a bit more detail than that - are there any key areas where those improvements happened?

Sure! With V2 we saw a more robust and granular hand model, with every finger and joint in the hand being identified. Significantly better performance against ambient light. And huge improvements to how the software handled finger occlusion.

A lot of these improvements were diminished when we went to VR -- new angles, complex backgrounds, different ambient lighting conditions. So we made the Orion software, which was an even bigger step up:

- lower latency

- longer range

- better and faster hand recognition

- vastly improved robustness to cluttered backgrounds and ambient light

> It would have been great to see it included in laptops, for instance.

It was included in laptops. It was terrible and useless.

A classic example of potentially great technology with very poor implementation and application.

AFAIK they rolled out some laptops and keyboards with it, but everybody I know that tried them gave up for various reasons.

It's hard enough to come up with compelling interactions using it already, adding technical issues and limitations meant enthusiasm died down. Now it's filed as "these fancy things that never really worked right" and attention has shifted to newer gadgets. I think it would be quite hard after that to convince manufacturers to integrate it again, since the first attempt didn't result in much outside the VR use case.

I've been meaning to come back to it and check out what's changed, but there is a long list of things I've been meaning to check out ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com