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Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

I got burned by Leap Mothion I won’t touch a thing they create.

I think my most fundamental complaint was when Leap Motion launched instead of being prescriptive about how it should work they deferred all drivers to app specific functionality when they could have at least had a reference generic driver that had consistent behavior across apps that could then be modified.

The device was a hog on system resources and worked only in super niche areas and I think I am mostly disappointed they didn’t go another route with a more generic input device. I’ve got no indication this device takes a different approach but tbh I don’t have the energy to do the work to check.

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I actually reverse engineered most of the code for the drivers for LeapMotion for my undergraduate project. Turns out it was illegal as per their TOS so my professor had me quit that project and take it offline.

The biggest problem I had encountered back then is that there was a packet transmitted with a certain signature in order to turn on the cameras that I could not reverse for the life of me (had something to do with the app version).

Other than that: basically two IR cameras that stream in an interleaved pixel format (2 x 640) x 480 iirc. It was a fun device to use and hack, but the first time I had ran into the brick-wall that is an enclosed format.

Head of the Leap tracking team here - we actually unlocked the UVC drivers for our cameras a while back! https://github.com/leapmotion/leapuvc

> LeapUVC gives you access to the Leap Motion Controller image data through the industry standard UVC (Universal Video Class) interface. This gives you low level controls such as LED brightness, gamma, exposure, gain, resolution, and more.

Oh wow! That is great news! Great job, will dig out my leap motion once I get back and try it out!

Interesting enough there is a device from Intel called RealSense that looks very much like a Leap Motion, the R435, sold for 275$ which purports to add a finger tracking interface to any current UI with a simple driver install and no changes to the UI code. It would appear that this is a step in the right diection.

Furthermore, the RealSense SDK is apparently open source, as opposed to what Ultraleap has, which seems rather closed and/or expensive.

I had to scroll down the page to see if Ultraleap is a product, a company, or some kind of open source project, and whether it has anything to do with the Leap Motion Controller. For those who were as confused as me, Ultrahaptics bought Leap Motion, renaming the resulting company to Ultraleap.

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