General Chat

This arrived today, one of the coolest gadgets I have used in a long time.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/leapmotion

Now to get it working in linux.

At £69.99 I think I will use the old fashioned method all though i'm sure it would make a great Christmas gift for my youngest son who is into gaming

Roy

It is my young gaming rellies who told me about it in the first place.

However LEAP is not a just toy. It is excellent for

CAD drawing and design esp 3D
adapting systems for the use of disabled people
statistical visualisation and manipulation
digital art & media

and much more. Microsoft are trying to do something like this with Surface but nowhere near as effective and of course Leap works with standard Windows OS.

As to price my OH mouse cost more than LEAP.

Well, that is incredible Rollo. Thanks for sharing it.

Oh wow!....I want one!

Rollo thanks for putting this on here.
Do you think this would be any good for my daughter who is disabled and has problems with using a keyboard.

I spend as much time as I can making money before I get Alzheimer's or something. A while a go I was the loser in a contest with a car which got me plumb and square on a zebra crossing. I more or less recovered but spent a good while discovering what life is like for disabled people. As a result I have a sideline in IT for the disabled which of course make no money at all but is the best part of my day.

The LEAP control is potentially a terrific thing for disabled people.

The downside is that programs have to be tailored to use the control - it is not an instant mouse/keyboard replacement. For the most part then this means that plain vanilla Windows programs are not supported out of the box. LEAP has quite a bunch of free programs to use with it.

Other programs can be adapted to work with LEAP if they can be scripted as is very often the case e.g. Autocad, MS Office, Google Earth. LEAP ships with an adapted version of Google Earth.

LEAP is also very sensitive which can be a problem for disabled people.

As I posted I have only just unboxed it and played around a bit and certainly don't have a lot of resource to develop program interfaces. My guess is that like RaspberryPi there will be a lot of stuff on the web sooner rather than later.

So for those with a disabled person yes, "Leap" is potentially the best thing I have seen in a long while BUT is is not ready as a mouse/keyboard just as it is, not yet.

That being said as a gadget for pure fun and improving 3D spatial skills it is great for kids so long as they can live with the sensitive feedback i.e. it is something like a gaming mouse or professional graphics pad.

Oh yes, it is needs a fairly big screen 21in as a minimum. I have been playing around with it using an old Sony Bravia 32in screen connected using hdmi.

take care

Thank you for the info. Rollo. Sounds good to me

Sylvia