Pictures of city skylines and fancy lattes, high-saturation filters, offbeat angles – these are just a few of the things that people love about Instagram. This week, we’re launching a contest with the Leap Motion community to find the photo or video that embodies the essence of Instagram.

How does it work? It’s simple:

1. Take a photo or video of the Leap Motion Controller in a setting that’s pure Instagram. Next to a beautiful plate of food or a weather-beaten street sign. In front of unusual-looking clouds or an old bicycle. Once you’ve revealed the inner beauty of the most mundane thing that you can find, take a photo or video with the Leap Motion Controller in frame.

2. Apply your favorite filter. Let’s face it – if you don’t apply a filter, it’s not a true Instagram. From Lo-Fi on your cupcakes to Hudson on your cityscapes, the right filter will work wonders on your colors and contrasts.

3. Post your masterpiece on Instagram. If you’re 18 or older, live in the United States, and accept our official contest rules, you can use the hashtag #LeapSquared to enter your photo in the contest. Be sure to post it by 11:59 pm PT on November 24.

Once all the entries are in, a panel of judges will score your creations and determine 10 finalists. Our Leap Motion community will then have the opportunity to vote on their favorite. The winner will receive US $20 credit in the Airspace Store and eternal bragging rights. Follow us on Instagram to check out the competition, along with photos and videos from our latest events, app demos, special promos, and life in the Leap Motion bunker.

With 116 titles and counting currently in the Airspace Store, there are lots of great apps to explore. This week, based on your reviews, we’re highlighting five of the most popular apps. Check out the video demos below for 3 computer control apps, an arcade smashup game and a hand-illustrated puzzle.

Computer Controls

Pointable

BetterTouchTool

GameWAVE

Games

Boom Ball

Gorogoa Puzzle

What’s your favorite app in the Airspace Store? Let us know in the comments, or give us a shout-out on Facebook and Twitter.

Tokyo-based industrial artist Aliceffekt’s album Telekinetic went live this week, and it’s already getting international coverage for how it was made – it’s the first known album release created with the Leap Motion Controller. By translating hand movements and gestures into retro-futuristic sounds, Aliceffekt created the full 20-minute ambient album using the Leap Motion Controller as his main instrument. He recently used the Leap Motion Controller in a live performance at Tokyo Indie Dance Party, which you can see here:

Besides performing as DJ Aliceffekt in Tokyo clubs, Devine Lu Linvega is a digital artist who wears many hats – building apps, designing games, and even inventing a synthetic AI language. Throughout his entire body of work, he keeps one foot in the future and always wants to evolve. During his DJ shows, he found himself getting bored and frustrated.

“I’ve always liked the idea of conducting music, weaving the music in midair,” he says. “This was impossible with the previous tools I had tried. I never really understood the appeal of twisting knobs of laptop shows. I have been scratching my head for a while, trying to get out of this boring image of the modern day music programmer.”

Using the Leap Motion Controller and Ableton Live, Lu Linvega created his own program that would allow him to control the range of a variety of sounds – triggering clips by counting the number of fingers being held out. By moving in three dimensions and controlling tones and clips with simple movements and gestures, he created Telekinetic. Check out this brief clip of his experimental app in action:

However, Lu Linvega says Telekinetic is only a small experiment; it’s a prelude to something much bigger – a whole new way for him to perform and create.

“I want to try something more ambitious for my next shows – involving visuals. I want to have this draw pictures in midair, as well as music. May it be Kinect or Leap Motion or something else, this way of performing – with motion control – is now the only way I shall conduct Aliceffekt shows in the future.”

Telekinetic is available for free download on Lu Linvega’s website, and he also shared his Leap Motion project files for other developers on GitHub. What do you think of Telekinetic – and where will Leap Motion music go next?

Game designers around the world have been inspired by the Leap Motion Controller’s incredible speed and accuracy to create games that take advantage of our unique 3D interaction technology. Last week, we caught up with Patrick Hackett – a game designer with popular indie developer Double Fine Productions – about his creative process in developing for the Leap Motion Controller.

Double Fine is widely known for creating quirky, innovative games that capture the public imagination. Their debut app for Leap Motion is the score challenge game Dropchord, which allows you to become a master DJ – dodging scratches, collecting notes, and jamming to an original electronic soundtrack. During our visit to Double Fine’s offices in San Francisco, we were invited behind the scenes to meet some of the amazing people who brought Dropchord to life.

When did you first experience Leap Motion, and what was your initial reaction?

Leap Motion first sent us some controllers in February and I think our initial reaction was the same as everyone who uses it. We were blown away by Leap Motion’s responsiveness and sensitivity. Jeremy Mitchell, one of my colleagues, had it set up at his desk initially and we were fighting over who got to use it next. Both of us ended up taking controllers home and creating demos over the weekend because we were so geeked up to use it.

Read More

While new interactive technologies offer near-infinite possibilities for app creation, few things can capture our imagination quite like games. Over the past several months at Leap Motion, we’ve seen hundreds of developers building games in a variety of genres, pushing our 3D interactive technology to the limits. Today, in honor of E3, I’d like to provide some insights on how our developers are transforming the gaming experience.

iVoltage’s 3D platformer Froggle, coming soon for Leap Motion. Take an adventure spanning 120 missions, where you can hop across lily pads, fly on a bird, ride a beetle, or control a jetpack.

There’s no magic formula for building incredible games. But there are a few fundamentals that a great game must accomplish. A great game is something you can play over and over again – something that tests your skills and gives you the thrill of accomplishment. It’s an unforgettable experience.

As the Director of Developer Relations at Leap Motion, I’ve played lots of games developed for the Leap Motion Controller. Over that time, I learned that all great Leap Motion apps, regardless of category, have one thing in common. They all achieve three essential things:

Read More

Jeremy Sutton, a master digital artist for more than 2 decades, has been using Corel’s Painter Freestyle Beta application for Leap Motion to explore new ways to make art. See how Leap Motion and Corel gives him a wide-open canvas and endless inspiration:

We met Jeremy in Austin, TX back in March during SXSW. He joined us for 3 days at the Leap Motion Experience to demonstrate the new ways he creates art with Leap Motion.

It’s been a couple of months since then, so we checked back in this week with 5 questions for Jeremy:

Why do you enjoy using Leap Motion to create art?

I love both the feel and results of painting in the air with the combination of Leap Motion and Corel Painter Freestyle Beta — it’s like none other. It’s very relaxing and enjoyable to be fluidly moving my hands and fingers through the air to create and control my brush strokes on my digital canvas. It feels like being a dancer, conductor, and magician all wrapped up in one. The results, some of which you can see at http://www.paintboxtv.com/air-painting/ , have a unique, wonderful, and playful quality of line that is different to anything else created in any other medium — digital or traditional. I can still get as much fine detail as I want, but combined with the looseness and serendipity of the 3D motion of my fingers in the air. Painting with Leap Motion really fulfills Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Read More

Today we released a sneak peek of Leap Motion’s Windows functionality, one of the essential features we’re refining for our July 22 launch. This video shows how Leap Motion technology will work easily and seamlessly with Windows OS.

With the Leap Motion Controller, you’ll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that’s possible with multi-touch inputs — without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we’ll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X.

With the help of the developer community in our beta program, we’ll continue to refine this OS interaction as well as the innovative apps in Airspace. This program is in place to make sure the Leap Motion experience is what we’ve planned all along: to be the most intuitive, natural, and magical way to interact with your computer and to transform how the world interacts with technology.

If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to our mailing list for updates and news as we continue on our journey together.