Good news for fans of video games, computers, and waving your arms around: there’s a new option for motion-sensitive gaming that is both cheaper and reportedly much better than the Kinect.
With the unveiling today of its Leap 3D motion control system, a San Francisco startup called Leap Motion has, well, leapfrogged the state of the art in this young field, giving users the ability to control what’s on their computers with hundredth of a millimeter accuracy and introducing touch-free gestures like pinch-to-zoom.
It operates with a USB stick and some dedicated software and goes on the market early next year for $70. It’s similar in concept to the Kinect but is not targeted exclusively at gaming:
Leap, by comparison, can sense motion down to the most subtle movements of a finger, which the company says is 200 times more sensitive than anything else on the market. The system creates a “three-dimensional interaction space” of four cubic feet and is more precise and responsive than a touchscreen or a mouse, and just as reliable as a keyboard.
That means everyone from game designers to surgeons to architects and engineers may soon have a host of revolutionary applications that will soon be coming their way.