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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

I'm sad the word 'robot' hasn't appeared in this thread yet. Let's correct that.

Visual slam is great for medium distances, but pointclouds aren't really that dense and are slow to update. Also the lidar to make the point clouds is stupid expensive.

Add one of these guys onto your robot and you've got a really cool set of 'wiskers.' Short range, highly sensitive, super fast update. I'd love to put several of these on a robot and use that to give it a sensitive field surrounding its body.

Depending on how open the software and hardware are this will be a great addition to the robotics community.

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I work on adaptive mobile robots as part of my research, and I'd be very interested to see how the LEAP compares to the Kinect in this area. I submitted a developer kit request, so maybe I'll get to find out.

Also, from the Ars Technica post on LEAP:

"The company says the breakthrough in resolution comes not from the hardware, which consists of relatively standard parts, but from what CTO David Holz calls 'a number of major algorithmic and mathematical problems that had not been solved or were considered unsolvable.'"

I'm conflicted by that statement. As a current academic, I hope they publish these supposed breakthroughs, as hiding them behind trade secrets makes me sad. As an entrepreneurial-minded person, however, I understand the desire for competitive advantage.

Likewise, I submitted a dev request. I'm already working with Kinect/Primesense tech to get point clouds and do gesture recognition work, but this could be a cheaper and potentially better option. At this point however, who knows? There's just not enough info on the capabilities, features, and API.

I would wait for the time they actually make the demo before getting too excited...

Great point. As far as openness, I'm concerned by this talk of an app store.

Indeed. I was going to apply as a developer, but that made me pause.

Perhaps I'll reconsider at some other time.

Even putting aside concerns about openness, the mere fact that they are talking this early about an app store is evidence that they're not focused on delivering value. Apple did not start talking about an app store for iDevices until they had millions of satisfied customers. I mean, why not use the Mac App Store? Maybe they have a good answer to that question, but if so, they should tell us what it is.

Why would they use the Mac App Store? To throw profits to Apple?

I was thinking Apple had this technology patented...maybe they have a licensing agreement that requires use of App Store.

Why? Android, Chrome, Firefox, etc have app stores and are still open. App stores are orthogonal to openness.

Actually the appstore itself is not "open", as in Google Play is proprietary. Unless by open you mean anyone can submit an app. But parent said "how open the software is".

I think Mozilla Market Place is (open) (?)

As long as the platform remains open to hackers, perhaps an app store is a good thing for something like this. There's nothing more infuriating than a cool piece of tech with half hearted vendor supplied software that requires lots of kludging to use outside their thinly defined parameters. An app store done right could encourage creation and easy distribution of novel uses if the kit to the non-hacker community.

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