A newly revealed company called Leap Motion has just announced plans to release a hardware add-on for the PC and Mac that it claims will change the way we interact with our desktops and laptops. It"s a motion sensing interface device that the company claims is "200 times more accurate than anything else on the market." That is a rather big salvo against Microsoft, which has already launched the Kinect for Windows add-on.
As you can see in the Leap video demo, the device itself is very small. However, it can apparently allow people to interact with PC and Mac programs and games with just the motion of the finger, compared to the wide and large arm and hand motions needed for the Kinect. It can even be used with a pencil to "write" on a PC program.
Leap Motion also claims that users of the device will be able to customize specific gestures for specific programs. The USB-based hardware can even be linked with more that one Leap device to create larger areas to interact with the PC.
The company isn"t saying much about how they were able to create this kind of software and technology, saying only that it has been working for the past four years "using a patented mathematical approach to 3D, touch-free motion sensing and motion control software."
Leap Motion is actually taking a limited number of pre-orders for the device, which it plans to sell for just $69.99. It aims to release the Leap sometime this Winter and it is also offering to send software developers a free SDK to get them to support the Leap.