I have been looking at some other control systems. The ‘leap motion’ looks great and I was going to get the pre-order but wouldn’t have any time to dedicate to it at the minute. It looks good though from what i’ve seen of it with unity. I think with these kind of systems at the minute they are still very niche. When you make something you want to distribute to people any barriers on the user end usually means its a problem. Its something that would be great if it became integrated throughout computing. For example until your laptop has in-build gesture control its something that users have to really want to use and buy separately.
With kinect it seams to have found a greater audience within the maker community, which oddly enough microsoft tried to prevent with its initially closed api that had to be hacked. Leap motion looks promising as they are launching with their own app store and developer kit. I believe its a few former apple employees behind their store service. It shows how a closed system doesn’t promote creation and its a far better strategy to allow people to access your system. Proprietary software might be good if you don’t mind the walled garden but the best creations come from allowing user access.
The gist of this post is that there is a lot of talk and interesting developments with gesture control and hopefully it gets adopted and we see a slew of apps and ideas. In terms of this project it lives and dies on one or two showings really. I enjoy playing around with it and it would be nice to make it available on the web but it would have to be with instructions to install drivers, get the adapter for your xbox kinect to pc etc..Leap motion looks promising as it will at least have a central location for apps as a business model along with developer support. The opposite of how microsoft managed kinect.
Ramble complete.
[button url=”https://www.leapmotion.com/” color=”black” ]Leap Motion[/button]
[button url=”https://www.thalmic.com/myo/” color=”black” ]MYO muscle gesture system (crazy stuff)[/button]
