The Minority Report Input Device Is Here

Balkroth said:
Which is a 2 ft per side of the cube area which is probably centered on the device, so a foot forward/backwards and side to side, and two feet vertically.
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Maybe you can connect 3 and use HandFinity...
 
mls1995 said:
Up to 8 feet?

The Leap is a small iPod sized USB peripheral that creates a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet
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that's quite a lot of square footage. I'm thinking I could mount one to the ceiling in front of the recliner or couch for the media center.
 
tempting, but i'll wait until some early purchasers get theirs and report on it. no sense risking my cc info on something that looks like a less powerful kinect. wouldnt mind using a kinect like this though. if you got it 1ft away like this thing is then it would probably be fairly accurate.
 
This looks like it creates a single 2D slice in front of the monitor and tracks whatever crosses through that slice. Basically no real depth. Just a 2D field and anything passing through that 2D plane is detected.

Also not sure how long you can hold your hand or arm up in front of you outstretched. 5, 10, 20 minutes max before it starts to take its toll.

This would be nice integrated into a laptop screen with a few mm clearance to give you touch capability without the touchscreen markup.

Otherwise this is nothing more than touchscreen capability a few inches in front of the screen itself.
 
I guess I take it back. Finally got to the end. Everything they did upto before the actual visualization of depth, though, could have been done by sensing a single plane. They need a better demo.
 
jpm100 said:
This looks like it creates a single 2D slice in front of the monitor and tracks whatever crosses through that slice. Basically no real depth. Just a 2D field and anything passing through that 2D plane is detected.

Also not sure how long you can hold your hand or arm up in front of you outstretched. 5, 10, 20 minutes max before it starts to take its toll.

This would be nice integrated into a laptop screen with a few mm clearance to give you touch capability without the touchscreen markup.

Otherwise this is nothing more than touchscreen capability a few inches in front of the screen itself.
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why would you need to hold your hand up for 5-10 minutes? It's no different from gesturing when you talk. Your arms interact. You lift your hand when needed. You drop them when you don't. You don't keep your arms to your side 24/7 unless you absolutely need them. I'd imagine at one time people said they don't see themselves holding their arms and hand over the keyboard and type for 8+ hours a day.

You interact with things. Steering wheel, shifter, telephones, keyboards, this LEAP device, holding babies.. it's the primary function of our arms and hands.
 
haunter said:
it does look cool

though the 'rumor' is that the kinect is far more powerful than it shows now, and its severly limited by the 360, due to having to work with the original ones that have low usb bandwidth
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Well, that's why Microsoft released the device and an SDK for PCs not too long ago. They've just cracked the surface of Kinect use, imo.

I like speculating about new stuff--so forgive me if I happen to go off the wall here...;)

The web site for Leap claims it's also a USB device and to complicate things further with respect to data throughput, it appears to be a wireless USB device--or maybe they didn't show the wire for the sake of the demonstration...;) USB 3.0 is going to do a lot to diminish bandwidth concerns for all usb devices, I'd guess.

I'll go back and watch it again, but I noticed the ad was very short on showing what the actual unit looks like--some kind of bar device laid in front of the monitor at a certain distance, would appear to indicate a wireless device--I didn't actually see a camera anywhere (I'll watch it again and see if I can spot a camera.) But if so, then this device works on a whole other principle--infra-red heat, maybe?--than the Kinect uses.

Watched it again--yea, definitely wireless and no camera is involved, apparently. I wonder if the pencil/stylus used is magnetic...? So...magnetic fields and infra-red?

On the usage as portrayed in the ad, I didn't see one single thing this this device enabled the user to do that couldn't be done with a mouse & keyboard--or, if you have to have it (ugh) a game controller. And, it appeared to me that economy of motion with a mouse and keyboard would be far greater than with your hand(s) stretched out in front of you as shown--you could accomplish more with mouse and keyboard and with less effort, I'm guessing. Optical mouse scanning is up to the thousands of dpi now, in regularly priced and even cheap mice, which means a little mouse movement can create a long swath across a computer screen if that is what the user desires. Or vice-versa, if the user sets it up that way.

OK, Read some stuff at the website. Although the company site goes to great lengths not to reveal the kind of information the Leap collects, it did use the term "motion sensing" and since there doesn't appear to be a camera involved, then infra-red motion sensing within an 8' square area around the device seems likely.

It's kind of like adapting a sensitive motion-sensing burglar alarm to this use with powerful software running on the host computer to turn the data into
information a software program can use, I would guess--can't wait to see the "driver" for my fingers...;) Still, I wonder about the pencil or stylus shown--magnetic or infra-red?

At any rate, this device does not seem to use the same data as the Kinect and so a direct comparison to the Leap might not actually be possible (if the Kinect operates on visual data collected by its cameras and the Leap is an infra-red/magnetic motion detector.)

The leap sure makes an interesting ad, though! (But hasn't "Minority Report" been done to death?) With so little data, however, including the fact it isn't yet shipping and cannot be reviewed, there's hardly anything here on which to base an opinion.
 
WaltC said:
long post
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no magnetic field. the "pen" is just a normal #2 pencil. you can see them also just using chopsticks with it for drawing and for playing angry birds. what i want to know is how it can see the whole hand including the backside. kinect only sees the front of an object since it uses cameras and to get a full 3d object you need at least 2 kinects.
 
im guessin it fills in the blanks, maybe it has a rough "hand" model and just scales that to what it sees. If it's smart that is, because even if you can't "see" the back of the hand, if you can see the front you already know where the back is
 
Either that or a 2-3 second complete rotation of your hand and bam, exact model lol
 
why the hell is it usb 2.0? thats just sad on something as cutting-edge and revolutionary as this.
 
I'll wait for a real review to see if it actually works first, but this definitely looks like something I might drop $70 on just for the hell of it.

Also, Windows 8 just got a lot cooler? lol :D
 
Use this with some augmented reality goggles and one might be able to almost touch virtual reality.
Too bad this wasn't actually in existence in the 90's, cyberpunks everywhere would have been wetting themselves.
 
ekuest said:
why the hell is it usb 2.0? thats just sad on something as cutting-edge and revolutionary as this.
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Probably started on the project before USB 3.0 launched, or perhaps he wanted to cater to a larger audience. USB 3.0 is still in its infancy.
 
This looks like it has the fidelity to interface with the operating system on a three monitor desktop. Very MINORITY REPORT indeed.

It would work from a seated at a desk position, can be placed further away from the monitor (again seated at a desk), and works with all existing computers and monitors. A win win win in my book.

I will be staying tuned.
 
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