Leap Motion gesture controls turn your life into Minority Report

There’s a popular image of future computer technology which involves people controlling massive holographic screens by gesturing and holding their hands. Popularly depicted in 2002 film Minority Report, it’s as much a part of our cultural vision of the future as artificial intelligence and physically improbable forms of space travel. Unlike those two bits of future tech, however, the development of usable gesture control systems has turned out rather well.

The Leap Motion is a £60 USB3 device, originally funded by a combination of venture capital and Kickstarter crowdfunding, which brings inexpensive gesture control to Windows, Mac OS and Linux PCs. You can even get an HP laptop, the Envy 17-j16ea, with a built in Leap Motion. Since its release in mid-2013, its AirSpace app store has filled up with over 150 different programs.

Leap Motion’s Airspace app launcher and web-based store let you choose between over 150 free and paid-for gesture controlled apps

The Leap Motion’s object and motion detection system works by using three infrared LEDs to cast a dot pattern extending above and around it. This is then monitored by two infrared cameras on the unit, which can capture 300 frames per second to keep up with fast, fine movements. All the processing of this data is handled by a driver installed on your PC.

The controller’s sensors watch a roughly hemispherical area of around 135 degrees above it. Because it’s small, it’s rather sensitive to how it’s positioned. When it came to fine movement, we got the best results with the Leap Motion positioned just in front of our keyboard on a desk that was low enough for us to comfortably prop our elbows on, although a handful of apps required a bit more room to move.

It’s not much to look at, but the Leap Motion lets you use your PC in an entirely new way

The combination of infra-red dots and camera is the same kind of system used by the Microsoft Kinect’s motion detection, but the Leap Motion works on a much smaller scale. It casts its infrared field up to about a metre above the unit, although we got the best accuracy at around the 50cm mark. It can also detect movement in front of and behind it. We found that movements in these areas were accurately detected at distance of around 20cm in either direction when you’re about 50cm above the unit. This means that it can detect motion in three dimensions.

Three dimensional movement is important to most of the apps designed for the Leap Motion: the ability to press is critical to everything from sculpting app Freeform to Touchless, the Windows gesture control interface. There’s something a little disconcerting about pressing a button that isn’t really there, although on-screen indicators help you orient yourself in space; we never quite got used to pressing something which provided no tactile feedback. Other apps required us to hold a finger in place over a button to click it or to quickly circle it. You don’t even have to use your finger: a pen or baton works well with apps that use one-fingered control.

Some of the most impressive Leap Motion apps give you a world of sound and vision to interact with

As well as pressing and sweeping gestures, the Leap Motion can identify circling motions, multi-finger gestures and pulling your hand backwards within the detection field. Some apps worked better than others. The simple slicing action of Cut the Rope was easy to perform fairly accurately and Touchless proved to be surprisingly effective when navigating the large buttons of the Windows 8.1 Start screen, although more complex desktop control apps felt overcomplicated.

There are lots of odd music and navel-gazing art apps in the AirSpace store, and it’s among these that you’ll find some of the most interesting and engaging applications of the controller. We were entranced by Lotus, which describes itself as a “mind altering audioreactive experience”, looks like the video screen at a psy-trance festival and plays like a suped-up Theremin. Another app that really makes the most of the Leap Motion is Volantes, an underwater massively multiplayer tower capturing game that has an innovative steering system in which you tilt your hands to move and manoeuvre. You even get to fire laser pulses by pushing your hands forward, which makes you feel exactly like a superhero.

Drift, swoop and dive through water in Volantes

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of wallpaper apps that look pretty but don’t do much. You can trail your fingers through pools of virtual water and herd shoals of fish about the place, but that won’t keep you engaged for long. More interesting uses of the controller include as a MIDI interface and drawing tool, although our results with the latter tended to be rather abstract.

It’d be a mistake to think of the Leap Motion as a human interface device on the same level as your mouse, keyboard or touchscreen. Nor does it have the sweeping scope of Microsoft’s room-encompassing Kinect. However, it’s a creative and innovative way to interact with your computer and its software in a completely new way. It’s little more than a slightly expensive toy, but if you’re into new technologies and particularly if you’re interested in developing your own gesture controlled apps, then Leap Motion’s clever, well-supported hardware and development environment have plenty to offer.