Friday Fun with Leap Motion on OSX

Motion tracking:  We all know it’s complete crap.

Rather than the smooth Minority Report navigation you’d hoped for, you usually end up flailing about like some sort of deranged spider monkey and very soon throw the thing into the bottom drawer never to be seen again.  The Leap Motion was in danger of becoming another piece of drawer padding, but if you use it for the right things, maybe it’s still useful.

The Leap Motion was never really going to work for precision control.  With no haptic feedback or split second visual cueing to guide you, it’s still very mushy.  Don’t get me wrong, it still has some seriously great tracking you have to try out, you just can’t jump into using it for precise control without a lot of practice.

So I’ve been concentrating on larger moves, like whole hand swipes, to control grander functions than most people want.

My apologies for the bad angle here, but you can see in the above video a demonstration of minimising everything to desktop with a 5 finger swipe down, locking the computer with a 5 finger swipe to the right, and unlocking the computer in a less than friendly manner.

All very basic, I know.  But it’s a start.  Got any suggestions, drop em in the comments.  More on this next week…