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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

If all you do is browse the web, a touchpad is often all you need.

For text editing / word processing, a good keyboard is often all what's needed, and the use of mouse is often discouraged by gurus.

I still can easily imagine using the Leap Motion device while editing images and especially 3D models. Even more I can imagine using it in games, especially games written with this device in mind.

I don't own the device but I tried it. What's great is that you don't need to wave your hands in the air, Minority report-style; moving your fingers us enough. I wish it was built into a keyboard; it would replace a touchpad / trackpoint easily, adding much more capabilities.

BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992?

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Mice worked pretty well in 1992. They worked well in 1984 on the Mac, and five years before that, on Xerox hardware and LMs (though they suffered from "really small ball bearing" disease, and easily got dirty or cranky and refused to roll well).

With a mouse, you have at least one button you can signal an event with.

Imagine doing a UI where you didn't have a mouse button. All you can do is move and point. That's a Kinect, for the most part.

I haven't used a LeapMotion, but I suspect it's the same problem; there's no way to generate a discrete event. It's all fuzzy. Did your fingers touch? Did you wave in a particular way? Some fuzzy matcher is pumping out "90% probability of event X, 75% probability of event Y" every few milliseconds, and it's up to higher layers to turn this goo into decisions that people are happy with. It's hard at all layers.

I really think you need a button, a clicker. Something "hard" in the UI that slams a voice of reason into that fuzzy tower that's continually only able to /guess/ what you're trying to do.

[We wanted a clicker on Kinect. Politically impossible. I think it would have helped a lot.]

Actually, it's quite possible to build a "clicker" on the Kinect. It involves mounting the sensor from above, and building completely different software that tracks the hands and fingers well.

We've done it: http://threegear.com Here's a video of tracking arbitrary hand motion using a Kinect-equivalent sensor: http://youtu.be/exZ6wukQCpk

I think he was calling out the microsoft politics as limiting the functionality of the kinect, not technical expertise.

video of hands (fingers) doesn't seem like the hard part here though (relatively speaking, I'm sure it's plenty hard). The hard part is recognizing the input the user wants. Tracking the finger is easy. Figuring out when that finger motion is a click is the hard part.

The video on your website is significantly more impressive than the linked youtube video. That being said, I still didn't see any "clicking". Perhaps I missed it.

Note how I mentioned PCs of 1992, already the majority platform that still sucked with this regard. (On Douglas Engelbart's computer mice worked impressively well in 1968.)

Take a look at a typical laptop; its trackpad also can't seem to generate click events. Still people tap on it and happily ignore hardware buttons (if they're present at all). Same applies to the wildly popular touch screens. Despite the fact that the finger's projection on a touch surface is large and fuzzy, it allows for rather fine motions.

Same thing is with Leap Motion (and probably Kinect): you can define a 'click zone' on a hard surface, like your desk or screen, or tap your fingers one against another. You instantly have 8-10 'mouse buttons'. Finger touch is pretty well-defined: not only positions but velocities of the fingers change in a discernible pattern.

> BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992?

I came here to state this. I'm studying interaction design, while I understand the author's frustrations, the problems do largely seem to be to be poor interface design for how to use the data the leap collects about your hand (and the visualiser demonstrates how accurate that data is).

Basically, the current basic demos try to mimick a mouse by way of using extremely clunky gestures. That won't work: for this to take off, the interface needs to be designed from the start with gestures in mind. I have some ideas on how to do that, but it will require some further tinkering and testing.

The sensor itself is amazing and in my experience very reliable - although I might be biased after having tried to design gesture based interfaces with the Kinect and not succeeding due to its technical limitations and unreliability.

> I wish it was built into a keyboard

This may very well happen if the Leap takes off. They already have distribution deals with HP and Asus; the next logical step would be building it into the laptop. Should be quite possible since the device is small and relatively cheap.

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