Asus and Leap Motion Bring Minority Report-Style Gestures to Life | Hacker News Reader

Asus and Leap Motion Bring Minority Report-Style Gestures to Life

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41 pointsRyanMcGreal47 comments

What do HNers think about the Leap "app store"?

I'm dying to get my hands on one of these awesome things and I have tons of use for it, but I'm seriously not interested in putting "apps" on Leap's "app store" and I don't like this trend at all. If, for example, Chrome adds APIs for extensions and apps to access Leap Motion, I want my cross-platform "app" to be discoverable on the Chrome store.

With the app store nonsense (imo), I feel Leap is distracting themselves from the real task of getting their device out on every damn machine out there and getting their SDK into every dev's hands.

Disagree? I'm all ears.

I think the app store is a good idea for the business and consumers. They need a place where everyone knows leap apps can be found to help drive the consumer adoption. Now, the implementation and/or restrictions is the make or break. There isn't any reason that they couldn't make your example feasible.

I remember when we would just use "the web" as a source of apps we could download (although we called them "programs" back then). Everyone knew about "the web" and it was easily searchable using search engines such as Google.

Then they used 'download.com' and 'tucows.com'.

Sadly, I expect many people did, rather than just going to the page of the people who actually made the software. With a "modern" app-store there's no choice, but using that kind of redistributor was just bloody silly.

Actually I often had to warn friends and family against downloading random programs of the internet (as I am sure many of us have). Although to people who frequent hacker news it may be "bloody silly", for others having a "trusted" third party is often preferable to dealing direct for a whole host of reasons. See for example Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, eBay, etc...

Wasn't it the best of both worlds though? Those sites had no vested interest in the platforms themselves and instead support all of the major ones, while still retaining incentive to root out malware. The only thing missing is a commerce system, no?

I only remember all the struggle and I'm glad it's a thing of the past. App stores are so much more convenient.

App stores can be very inconvenient for developers (the app store can veto you, even if you beg right), and for users, they remove (simply by hiding) much of the implied control that exists on the desktop, where one can manage applications as files. The filesystem is still there, but it is so buried it might as well not exist. They may be convenient, but they are not a substitute... It shouldn't be either-or, it should be both.

...it was a struggle?

For anyone who didn't know: Mac and Next users have always informally called them apps. ".app" was actually the NeXTStep extension for program bundles (now carried over to Mac OS X).

Won't a catalog or showcase site do? What if I want to make a mac or windows app that uses the LeapMotion controller if available, and dumbs down to the trackpad if not? i.e. the focus is not on the controller itself, but on the task I wish to achieve through it?

> There isn't any reason that they couldn't make your example feasible.

That can happen if they, for example, won't license their SDK to be bundled as APIs for "Chrome packaged apps". If they did, there may not be an incentive to have your app live on their app store. I don't at the moment know what's in their SDKs, but setting up an app store can introduce such (imho artificial) conflicts of interest.

OTOH, it's their product and they may very well say "it's exclusive, folks". The irony is that I'm a bit pissed because I want this bad .. and without those ropes! Hope I'm not required to put apps on their store. Furthermore, I hope Wacom doesn't catch on to this trend and start a "Wacom App Store" as well.

I agree. If you have a Windows 8 machine now, you have Amazon, Google, Apple, Windows, and Steam, all competing for you as a user of their "App store."

When I envisioned a future of digital downloads, this is not what I imagined.

Edit: I forgot Mozilla and Facebook.

I don't like it either. Perhaps there is room for someone to build an aggregation engine?

I agree.

The benefit of these "app stores" is lost when they are so splintered.

The current trend towards everyone having their own "app store" is almost as annoying as every app developer wanting to install their own update manager that starts on computer bootup. Screw that noise, just because I'm using your shit doesn't mean it is that important to me.

>>With the app store nonsense (imo), I feel Leap is distracting themselves from the real task of getting their device out on every damn machine out there and getting their SDK into every dev's hands.

Agree.

I wonder how useful it'd be to make 3D models of things.

I'd imagine waving my broken shower head over it for a while, then using some sort of 3D magic software I could get a half decent CAD file that I could 3D print and repair that bad boy.

I don't think that's the idea behind this interface.

Besides, what you ask already exists, in the form of 3D scanners.

No, but it could be useful for manipulating 3d objects in CAD programs.

I was excited when I saw the leap motion demo a few months ago. I didn't realize that it was 8 cubic feet of space, i thought it was just 2-3 feet from the device.

Being bundled with Asus is nice, but I think it's difficult for a PC maker to differentiate themselves.

When you go to buy a computer does anyone decide feature wise between an Asus or a Samsung? One big decision is Mac or PC. When you decide PC, you look for some deals or good prices.

> i thought it was just 2-3 feet from the device.

You're right.

2 feet x 2 feet x 2 feet = 8 cubic feet.

I've got an ASUS laptop running windows 8, I can say I'm looking forward to forgetting this dumb touchy trackpad and replacing it with a leap. (I may even try and remove the trackpad, hollowing out the space for a leap. If I feel brave :) )

Edit: Oh and yes feature set is important, but I find that just about all mid range to high end laptops have everything I want (USB 3.0, Webcam for programming stuff, 1080p screen (I chose my ASUS over a Samsung because it has excellent speakers and a sub woofer bullet. [both of which blast out beautiful sound.])

They can also be daisy-chained together to form a much larger usable space...

Do you think you could point it at your face and use your eyes to select/activate a window?

That would be nice. Augmented reality app???

I could see it being really helpful for accessibility for people with disabilities.

In reviewing the videos it seems that the device can be in a look-up mode or in a look-sideways mode. Does anyone know if it works in look-down mode?

By look-down I visualize it attached to the top of my display and looking down.

The advantage would be that your hands are supported by a table. This would lower the muscle strain when interacting with a device for a long period of time.

If it can do look-sideways, I can't see why not. Simply reverse/invert output where necessary, no?

I'm thinking of background noise caused by reflections from an underneath table.

Can't wait to see how this goes. I can't imagine why MS hasn't bought them yet. Seems like the perfect fit for Win8.

I really hope MS will not buy them - it would be a real pity to have this new technology limited to Windows

Absolutely.

Does anyone have any idea how this works?

I have one of the Leap prototype units through the SDK program. (They say there's no NDA and they want people to talk about it, so it should be ok to post my observations here...)

My unit doesn't have the final casing, so the basic components are in plain sight. There are two cameras and some infrared LEDs. The LEDs appear to emit a sequence of pulses which is seen by the cameras at a high frame rate -- somewhere in the Leap docs it's mentioned that the highest frame rate sent by the device over USB is around 300 fps.

The magic is in the processing, of course. I don't know how that is split between the device and the Leap driver running on the host computer.

The data obtained through the SDK is preprocessed into hands that are further divided into fingers or "tools" such as a pencil being held by the user. It doesn't seem to be possible to get raw depth data, but the hand data is high quality and the latency is impressive -- it feels very good in use.

RE: the infrared LEDs, I believe that's how the kinect works as well.

The Kinect is a bit different. It has one regular camera, one infrared camera and an infrared projector. It projects a random-looking pattern which is seen by the camera and analyzed by the unit's firmware. The pattern's perspective and scale distortions are mapped into depth coordinates (perhaps aided by the visible light camera image). The device then outputs RGB+depth images via USB with a maximum frame rate of 60 fps.

The Leap doesn't have an infrared projector that could emit a precise pattern, but it has two infrared cameras that run at a much higher rate than the Kinect's. I think the Leap's depth detection is based primarily on stereo vision mapping with some kind of temporal component.

Ah, interesting. Thanks.

Sounds like a Kinect.

You can use pretty much any webcam or phone cam to see well into the infra-red. If you turn off the lights and look at the device - and especially at your hand using it - through such a camera, you are likely to see the IR and gain some extra insight as to how it works.

From your description, it looks like it can be repurposed as a 3d scanner (as imagined by monk_e_boy). Would be nice to see raw access. I would like to use it to scan fingering techniques on string instruments.

So does this have high enough spacial resolution that you could have an augmented reality system create a virtual keyboard in from of you and you could type on it?

I'm picturing a future full (virtual) keyboard interface for google glass. Thoughts? concerns?

You need to think bigger. This is the future of teledildonics.

Interesting tidbit about preordering: They claim to only bill when they ship a device, but ask for Credit Card information. Ergo they need to store cc information in clear text somewhere.

Leak in 3.. 2..

I could be wrong but I think some of the credit card tokenization models allow for billing at a later date. (as in, give the CC information now, receive a token, use that token later to charge)

Yes, many providers allow that (Stripe, Amazon, even Paypal)

I presume then that is how restaurants add tip to a credit card charge after returning it to the customer. I always used to wonder.

I think restaurants pre-authorize your card for some percentage over the actual tab, and then just capture the final amount including tips.

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