"Leap Motion": high res 3D motion detection

Bob,

Neat!

The video here reminds me of a theremin.

That's $70 end-user price, which makes me wonder what the "innards" ( "line laser" plus linear photodiode array? ) would cost if integrated into another product.

I also wonder what effect the technology behind this will have on the touch-screen panel market. Even the full retail $70 sounds like less than the cost for adding resistive or capacitive touch-screen support to, say, an LCD panel.

Frank McKenney

Could be a big hit once they start delivering in volume...

On a sunny day (Wed, 6 Feb 2013 17:12:44 -0000) it happened "TTman" wrote in :

If it comes with a Linux driver I would buy one :-)

Pretty nice item... Thanks.

I'll bet you could easily write a "Theramin App" for that.

And considering the resolution, it would be quite precise.

I have "pad" apps for my iPad from Moog and Akai and other big names.

Really nice synth apps. The "pads' are similar in operation to the theramin, only 2-D.

At the bottom of the page:

• The Leap Motion controller works with Leap-enabled software only. Functionality may vary depending on software.

How useful it becomes depends on how widely accepted it is, though.

Its just another Kinect but optimised to recognize fingers. IOW it is a simple infrared webcam. The heavy lifting is probably done by the host CPU.

A single webcam would not give you range. Probably 2 webcams?

I wonder if the monitor's light is a requirement for it to operate.

Jon

Not so much to add touch screen, maybe us$ 0.40 at assembly time. Maybe us$ 10 at retail.

Volume baby, volume, > 1E7/year.

?-)

The case appears to be a hard IR-bandpass filter, making that unlikely.

There are some really interesting ideas here about lensless optics:

which lead to addt'l interesting topics. Point being that a lens sums/ redirects many source rays onto one point on the imaging array. That destroys position information. If you don't do that, you can compute position from the image, re-focus after the fact, etc. Neat stuff.

Joseph,

Thanks for the update. I hadn't realized that the extra cost for "touch" had fallen so low.

Frank

Maybe

It may not actually be that low, but the volume is at least that high. Every bloody smart phone and tablet; and a bit more.

?-)