In September, I won a Leap Motion Controller at a hackathon and started thinking about what I could build with it. After playing around with the SDK a little bit to understand what kind of data I could get, I thought it would be cool to build a translator for sign language.
// Code
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is upon us. Everyone is having Star Wars fever, including me. What I wanted to do is to find the easiest way to control a lightsaber just like they do in the movies. I bought my son a lightsaber toy at Toys ‘R’ Us, and wanted to introduce him to the […]
VR has the power to transform our lives and connect us in new ways, while hand tracking lets you reach beyond the digital divide and take control. As part of our 3D Jam spotlight series, here are 17 utility demos that let you reach into a sea of data and extract its insights, explore a […]
There are no limits to what you can hack together with the Leap Motion Controller – which is why this year’s Leap Motion 3D Jam includes an Open Track for desktop and Internet of Things projects! In this post, hardware hacker Syed Anwaarullah walks through his 3D-printed robotic hand project, which appeared at India’s first-ever Maker Faire. The […]
Over the next few years, billions of devices are going to spill onto the Internet and rewire our world in ways never before thought possible. Alongside augmented and virtual reality, the Internet of Things has the potential to change the world and how we see it. That’s why with this year’s 3D Jam we created […]
With the 3D Jam just around the corner, we thought we’d give you a headstart – with a full guide to the very latest resources to bring your to life. In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about our integrations and best practices for augmented and virtual reality, desktop, and the Internet of Things. A […]
What makes a collection of pixels into a magic experience? The art of storytelling. At the latest VRLA Summer Expo, creative coder Isaac Cohen (aka Cabbibo) shared his love for the human possibilities of virtual reality, digital experiences, and the power of hugs. Isaac opens the talk by thinking about how we create the representation […]
When the Leap Motion Controller made its rounds at our office a couple of years ago, it’s safe to say we were blown away. For me at least, it was something from the future. I was able to physically interact with my computer, moving an object on the screen with the motion of my hands. And that was amazing.
Fast-forward two years, and we’ve found that PubNub has a place in the Internet of Things… a big place. To put it simply, PubNub streams data bidirectionally to control and monitor connected IoT devices. PubNub is a glue that holds any number of connected devices together – making it easy to rapidly build and scale real-time IoT, mobile, and web apps by providing the data stream infrastructure, connections, and key building blocks that developers need for real-time interactivity.
With that in mind, two of our evangelists had the idea to combine the power of Leap Motion with the brains of a Raspberry Pi to create motion-controlled servos. In a nutshell, the application enables a user to control servos using motions from their hands and fingers. Whatever motion their hand makes, the servo mirrors it. And even cooler, because we used PubNub to connect the Leap Motion to the Raspberry Pi, we can control our servos from anywhere on Earth.
Early last month, Leap Motion kicked off our internal hackathon with a round of pitch sessions. This basically involves everyone bouncing crazy ideas off each other to see which ones would stick. One of our tracking engineers suggested using our prototype Dragonfly module to augment a physical display with virtual widgets. Our team of five ran with this concept to create AR Screen.
You’ve probably heard the rest of the story. Our team’s video got shared on /r/oculus and led to a feature on Wired. While the Wired story focuses a lot on the experience side of things – the power of spatial thinking and offices of the future – it was light on the technical details. Since we’ve heard from a lot of VR developers interested in the project, I thought I’d do a deep dive here on the blog.
Hackathons are a great way to jumpstart creativity, especially when honor and glory are on the line. Recently, Leap Motion kicked off one of our internal hackathons, where small teams pitch and develop quick demos over the course of two days. After one of our engineers posted a video of AR Screen – a project using the Dragonfly module prototype to create an augmented reality work environment – the video soon went viral and was later featured on Wired.
While none of the demos produced during the hackathon were intended to be polished products, we’re excited to see what these small teams were able to build over just 48 hours. Today, we thought we’d take a closer look at some other projects from the hackathon. Next week, we’ll have more to share about the AR Screen project.