Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/23/review_leap_motion_controller/

Leap Motion Controller: Hands up for PC air gestures. That's the spirit

Give that annoying app the finger with new USB widget

By Tony Smith

Posted in Personal Tech, 23rd July 2013 09:03 GMT

Review Can such a small, silver and black gadget deliver all it promises? Talk to the device’s creator, Leap Motion, and it’s clear that plenty is indeed being pledged. The tiny box - at 79 x 30 x 10mm, it’s barely bigger than a disposable lighter - is called the Controller and it will help “break down the barriers between humans and technology to realise the potential of both” with its “incredibly natural way to interact with your computer”.

So says Leap Motion, at any rate. Me, I’ve yet to be convinced.

Leap Motion Controller

Leap Motion’s Controller: hand-monitoring hardware to replace your mouse?

The technology is certainly impressive. The Controller contains a pair of cameras capturing 200 shots every second. Three infrared LEDs provide the illumination, helping the cameras to see all the parts of your hand and to detect even very tiny movements they make.

It’s not so very different from Microsoft’s Xbox accessory Kinect, but much, much smaller and focused. The Controller can get away with a more compact size because it’s designed for desktop use, whether it’s hooked up to a traditional tower or placed in front of a laptop. According to Leap Motion, the Controller keeps its electronic eyes on a what is essentially a hemisphere of just 60cm radius above and around its gloss-black plastic window.

Any hand movements made within that zone can be tracked by the Controller and interpreted as application control gestures. It’ll follow both of your hands separately and simultaneously as you move them up and down, toward and away from the screen, rotate them at the wrist, and wiggle, point and make circles with your fingers and thumbs. Crossing your two hands at the wrist confuses the Controller mightily, but pretty much anything you might do with a mouse, a trackpad, a joystick or a games controller can now potentially be done with this wee, USB-connected device.

But not, of course, without software. Out of the box, the Controller does nothing. You’re invited to download Windows or Mac software, but this only provides drivers, settings and calibration tools, and a basic demo app that shows how the Controller’s detectors can be used to model your hands in order to let you waft colour lights around the screen.

Leap Motion Controller

Digital divide

To do more than that, you’ll need to download Controller compatible apps from Airspace, Leap Motion’s new curated app shop. Apps are selected and acquired through the Airspace website, but are presented within a native Airspace launcher. Even Leap Motion’s own offerings are distributed through Airspace, including its free Touchless apps, which let you interact with Mac OS X and Windows using hand gestures and the Controller rather than a mouse.

Unlike Apple’s iOS App Store - but just the same as Apple’s Mac App Store - developers aren’t forced to distribute their Controller-enabled apps through Airspace, but the company hopes they will prefer to do so, the better to reach as many owners of the hardware as possible.

It’s essentially the old razors and razor blades model: the handle doesn’t cost much; it’s the sharp parts the manufacturer makes its money from. The Controller costs $80 (£52), but Leap Motion also takes a 30 per cent cut of whatever price a developer sells an app through Airspace. As Apple and Google have found, it doesn’t take long to rack up some tidy sums of money. Leap Motion’s offering is not a product you can just buy and use as you would a new mouse. Signing up with Airspace is effectively mandatory if you want to do anything more than mess with the bundled demo app.

The Controller, then, is kind of a loss-leader for Leap Motion. The company isn’t so much offering a gadget as selling software. The Controller is simply the low-cost hook that draws the punters in. Leap Motion’s business model is clearly based on its pitch to software developers: we have a user community you can sell apps to, but to sell to them you’re going to have to pay us.

Leap Motion Controller

Compact

To be fair, it has to. It can’t develop all the apps itself, and there’s a lot less money to be made flogging hardware alone. But this is tricky chicken-and-egg stuff for a new business punting a new technology to manage. Can it grow its userbase sufficiently quickly to persuade developers to invest in the creation of interesting apps? And can it get enough developers producing engaging software to encourage punters to buy and use the Controller?

Airspace launched on 22 July and at that time it contained 67 apps, most cross-platform but perhaps a dozen tied to just one of the two supported OS platforms. It’s not an impressive selection. There are plenty of games to try, plus a fair few virtual theremin-type apps, but none that will divert you more than momentarily. Others are more technology demos than useful apps: attempts by developers to see how they might use motion control rather than apps that clearly benefit from it: AutoTrader magazine’s Driver’s View, for instance, or the Leap-enabled version of the New York Times.

There are a few apps that might actually be useful in Airspace, but do you really want to buy, download and use a whole new photo browser and catalogue application - I’m thinking of Pixite’s Unbound here - just to be able to waft through pictures with hand gestures? I might use gestures if they were added to apps I already use, but I’m not sure I want to pay for and transfer data to a new application solely so I can use a new control method.

Leap Motion Controller

You need to keep it clean

Especially when, for all the technical sophistication of its implementation, the Leap Motion system suffers some fundamental, practical flaws. For a start, using the Controller is tiring. Simple Wii-style whack-the-ball 3D versions of Breakout are one thing, but using Leap Motion’s own Touchless to launch apps, select menu items, to move windows and scroll their contents requires a whole fresh bank of muscle memory to be learned and small, precise hand movements to be mastered.

Pitch, roll and yawn?

Selecting menus, for instance, requires moving your hand forward to lock the Touchless’ cursor onto the name. It’s a straightforward gesture, but hard to get right simply because it’s so easy to move your hand only very slightly but nonetheless far enough to catch a different menu or a window’s title bar. To release it, you have to move your hand away from the screen again, at which point you’re just back to square one.

I found this back and forth movement, trying to zero in on small screen icons with only visual feedback, a real struggle and very frustrating. I found myself time and time again just reaching for a mouse instead. Friction stops a mouse gliding around the desk, but held-out hands do not stay perfectly still no matter what, and the Controller’s high resolution means that even very slight movements are captured and processed. Hands don’t move in straight lines; they move in arcs as they pivot around wrist and elbow joints. Mice, because they’re constrained by desktops, do move in straight lines.

Leap Motion Controller

You can’t do much with the Controller until you download apps from Airspace

Tactile feedback, and the way the inertia of physical peripherals helps keep your hand steady, count for more than you realise when you’re trying to be precise.

This is particularly an issue for those of us who have now been using a mouse for so long that we move our left or right hand to it instinctively. It’s why I rarely use the touchscreen on my Lenovo Thinkpad Ultrabook: I just naturally, unthinkingly reach for the trackpad, not the screen.

You might be willing to put in the effort to train your hands and arms - practice will indeed make (almost) perfect - if Leap Motion’s control system allowed you to do things you can’t do with other devices, but it doesn’t.

Apps add new gestures, such as circling a finger - think of using an old rotary dial phone - to scroll up or down, but I encountered no actions that couldn’t be achieved with a traditional input device. In some cases, such as Emantras’ educational app Frog Dissection, it would have been easier to use a touchscreen or trackpad.

Indeed, I’d say that the growing support for multi-touch gestures on ever bigger trackpads is much more useful than Leap Motion’s technology. The two-, three- or four-fingered gestures are straightforward and easy to learn, you have tactile feedback from the surface of the pad; more importantly, your hands, if they’re on the keyboard, are so close to the trackpad, you expend very little energy moving them back and forth.

Leap Motion Controller

Manipulated a molecule - but you still need a mouse to select ove

It has to be said, however, that the Controller, and devices like it, do have the potential to allow users to work with data in a way they’ve not been able to do so before. Leap Motion CTO David Holtz says he was inspired to create the Controller by the desire to find a way to model virtual clay that was as subtle as working with the real thing can be. I can see the emergence of specialised applications that will make use of the Controller in innovative and interesting ways.

But I’m not convinced we’re about to see a sudden, sharp shift in computer control that we most recently saw with the arrival of the touchscreen on phones and then tablets. And we’re certainly not on the verge of some Minority Report-style ‘wave your hands around’ reinvention of the computer-user interface, even though there are a few situations that could do with it. Turning the pages of a virtual recipe book when your hands are all floury and eggy without actually touching them will be a godsend to cooks. But I can’t see the rest of us reaching for it.

That won’t stop desperate computer makers from reaching out for Leap Motion - or going their own way - as they attempt to use the technology’s novelty to persuade tablet-hungry punters to buy computers again. HP is already working on Leap Motion-powered kit and so, Leap Motion claims, are others. Asus has said it’ll bundle the Controller with future machines. Throwing touchscreens at laptops and all-in-one desktops hasn’t helped the sales of either, and I don’t think Leap Motion technology will either.

The Reg Verdict

Leap Motion’s much-hyped hand-detection control system is a gimmick, and we’ve seen those before. Sony’s motion control system, Move, was a flop, and Kinect, which is technologically more sophisticated than Move, hasn’t exactly set the gaming world alight either.

Both were devised primarily to tap into what Sony and Microsoft believed was underpinning the success of Nintendo’s Wii: motion control. Perhaps it was, but such technology has done little to boost the fortunes of the PS3 and Xbox, largely because there are so few situations where it actually makes sense to implement. Gamers by and large prefer the controllers they know.

And I think many computer users will likewise stick with the peripherals they’re accustomed to. That’s no slur on Leap Motion’s technology, which is impressive and full of potential. But that potential can only be realised with both good software and, most of all, an appropriate application of the control it provides. ®