Gadgetory

hey I'm Scott Stein and I am playing a game on a Windows 8 PC hands-free with leap motion this actually works with Windows 8 Windows 7 and with Macs what is it well I'll explain it's this this little puck is leap motion it's $80 and it allows connect like connectivity for computer it does have to work with its own app ecosystem which is one of the leap motions drawbacks and catches although that app ecosystem is pretty big at launch over 70 apps to start so it's simply you plug it in via USB you put it down you download the starting software called airspace and there's an associated airspace store that holds all of the apps now the lay makers elite motion are open to the idea of having applications be outside of the store maybe certain applications actually like Google Earth right now has the ability to work with leap motion via software update that could be quietly posted about or bumped up the fine tuning is the important note the makers of leap motion and vision people may be using this for robotic surgery or for fighter planes that may sound a little bit scary but the idea is that this is really much more fine-tuned than a Kinect is and you can see here my hand hovering over the space and it notices each one of my little joints and notices little tiny Wiggles and movements as I move my hand so that's kind of cool now it seems like this would be great for games and there already are a couple of games this one is dropped cord by Double Fine and it's a music based rhythm game that allows you to move use both fingers around this circle and collect things and time things for points it's a pretty fun demo it's a real game too so it's not just a demo of technology and this is one of the launch games that's currently available and if you fancy doing a little bit of painting and art you can with things like Corel Painter freestyle beta and air paint to your heart's content and you know what my arm is getting tired I'm feeling really tired doing this over a period of time it's kind of like a workout because you got to hold your hands in this space up here it's not really a lower zone an upper zone so if you're the type of person who has a standing desk than your set but if your type of person who sits down at a desk which is most of us then you might find that over a long period of time this is probably not the most comfortable productivity tool in the entire world now there is an app called touchless that allows you to use leap motion with Windows 8 or Windows 7 or Mac and actually navigate the operating system so you can go outside of the app universe that is kind of a weird mixed bag now you can see here my finger is actually becoming the cursor and I'm navigating around and I just accidentally launched a game that shows that you have to push into click and that's the part that's a little unintuitive here and the gestures are made to work with your fingers and you know what you're probably just gonna reach up and touch the screen or use a trackpad and guess what it connects to your Mac as well as I said so you can connect it to your MacBook Air or iMac or Mac of choice and it works with OS 10.7 and later now certain apps work with just Mac or just Windows but a lot of them are meant to work with both Mac and Windows so that's leap motion in a nutshell connect on your desk in a small scale space you probably don't need it but if you start imagining using this and something like oculus rift or you wanted to manipulate molecules or you want to see where gestural computing might go next and don't want to spend all that much to get into it for $80 the experiment is yours now and it's an intriguing one and there are certain to be a lot more apps to get in the space and who knows you might even have a computer with this technology built in sometime soon I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at leap motion available now