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South by Southwest Interactive Recognizes User Interface Advances

The recently concluded South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW Interactive, March 8-12, 2013, Austin, Tex., USA) has awarded its Breakout Digital Trend Award to Leap Motion for its Leap Motion Controller hardware and software. This is scheduled to ship to consumers beginning May 13, 2013 with pre-ordering available now at a price of $79.99.  Leap Motion’s approach to promoting their user interface technology has been to provide demos of their device (photo below) illustrating that it is responsive and accurate for 10 finger tracking. They also have seeded a large number of developers with sample units, and discussed the applicability of their hardware and software for embedded applications in notebook and desktop PCs, mobile phones and tablets and other devices.

Leap-Motion-Controller-0313To date, Leap Motion has shipped more than 12,000 devices to developers to stimulate adoption of its motion control technology. Mike Zagorsek, vice president product marketing at Leap demonstrated the operation of the Leap Motion Controller at SXSW as shown in the video below.

Source: Engadget

The Leap Motion Controller consists of the device hardware, a software development kit (SDK) for developers, and an app store named Airspace that will launch in May when consumer device shipments begin.

As an input device for a notebook or desktop PC, the Leap Motion Controller acquires and tracks all ten fingers of the user in a 2x2x2 foot cube over the device as illustrated in the video. The Leap developers believe that the Leap Motion Controller can become the preferred input device for 3D content creation and manipulation, and for navigating 2D content on large displays where touch sensing is not appropriate. In addition to pointing, the Motion Controller can be used to select, tap, swipe, poke and enter gestures.

Leap’s CEO Michael Buckwald has stated that he does not envision the Leap Motion Controller replacing the keyboard and mouse input paradigm when the device launches on May 13. However, Syntellia, Inc. the developer of the Fleksy text input application was also at SXSW this week showing its software working with the Leap Motion Controller to provide gesture-based typing input. It’s too soon to assess whether the Leap controller will become as ubiquitous as keyboards, mice and trackpads. However, given the market acceptance of devices such as Microsoft’s Kinect, and consumers’ interest in improved user interfaces for their consumer electronics products, we look forward to continuing new and hopefully improved user interface approaches to come.

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