Jack showed me a cool product called Leap Motion the other day. I took a few minutes to play with it and can definitely see a wide range of applications. What is it? Basically it’s a sensor system that picks up hand gestures to control applications on your computer (or even your computer itself). While not dissimilar in concept to the Primesense family of technologies (e.g. Xbox Kinect and Asus Xtion) the system stands out in as focused primarily on hand gestures and PC applications as opposed to gaming. Many controllable apps are available through their app store with a good portion of them educational in nature such as this anatomy program that let me dissect a skull. The system has an SDK available so programmers can quickly build apps around it without much ground-up work. It certainly presents a lot of potential in the education arena.
This isn’t far out tech or some obscure device you’ll never see in the field either. The unit is $80 and as of this month HP has started shipping laptops with Leap tech built into it with Asus soon to follow. Very Minority Report-ish!
