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Comment by rjdagost | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any real-world experience using the Leap? It looks cool as hell but I'm hearing rumors that it doesn't work well in the presence of halogen / incandescent bulbs or direct sunlight. If I have to carefully control the lighting to be able to use it, that's a dealbreaker for me.

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Yes, I have a dev kit and have played around with a it a bunch. I'm very impressed with the low latency and high framerate (~110 fps via usb 2, rumored to go higher for usb 3.0). Latency is unquantified but barely perceptible even when moving quite quickly.

The potential performance issue is with dropouts and interference. It's pretty easy to have detected fingers drop in and out, mostly due to fingers occluding each other. With a level of dynamics modeling/filtering built on top of the leap SDK, it may be possible to minimize the impact of dropouts.

overall, it does seem like a reasonable way to interact with a computer, especially for drawing or manipulating objects, etc.

I unfortunately can't post a video because we're building the leap into a trial clinical device at the moment and its out of my hands.

Clinical devices are an awesome idea for this... nice one! Having worked on systems in hospitals before, I couldn't believe the number of times users had to handrub etc. each time they went from handling our scanners back to the actual product they were working with.

Congratulations on an awesome way to remove that step.

had the same issues with the dev-kit, hope they implement some sort of a multi-device mode in the future which gets rid of these occlusions caused by having only one point of view to the scene (you can do only so much with modeling, but that would be a start). The interaction experience for actual hand-gestures is, due to these limitations (sweet-spot-size, occlusion and hand orientation) far from what could be considered intuitive. Single tip input with chopsticks is the only mode that works immediately as one would expect.

It gets testy around walls.

My experience is that in a moderately-lit situation (or a low-lit one) the thing works pretty great.

A few times I've had to move stuff out of the way because it would trigger a false hand presence.

Lighting hasn't been an issue for me; I get assorted warning messages ("Bright light!" "Low light!") but it doesn't seem to make a noticeable difference in what I've been doing.

I tried shining a laser pointer on but it didn't do anything. That was disappointing. :)

My understanding of it is that it uses near-infrared LEDs (slightly longer wavelength than visible light) to illuminate your hands, and that's why certain types of light sources that emit a lot of light at these wavelengths are alleged to cause trouble. It makes sense that a laser pointer wouldn't cause any interference because laser light is not in the passband that the cameras can see.

Ah, thanks!

I need to experiment with different light source then.

These devices work surprisingly well. I have been fairly happy with its performance.

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