Last week, hundreds of visitors to the Autodesk Gallery got to explore the magic of Leap Motion during Autodesk’s Design Night on Oct. 3. The Leap Motion plugin for Autodesk Maya 2014 is an incredibly powerful tool for professional designers creating in 3D space. To celebrate Halloween, the Maya team made a special character for users to play with – a 3D Jack-o’-Lantern created and customized in the air with their hands.

Pinching and pulling various headpieces, colorful eyewear, and other wacky accessories onto their creations, participants could then swipe their hand to give their pumpkin a toothy grin or spooky frown. We spoke to designers and developers of all ages looking to integrate Leap Motion technology into their future 3D design projects – creating living, breathing scenes and dynamic characters who might jump right off the screen.

Autodesk’s a perfect fit with Leap Motion, and we had a great time at the event (big thanks to the whole Autodesk team). We’re looking forward to posting future developments with the company and its designers.

While much of the work with Leap Motion and Maya has involved creating and manipulating 3D characters (i.e. virtual puppeteering) we’re excited about the wider possibilities for 3D design and Leap Motion control, from art and education to architecture and engineering.

We’d love to hear what you think – what’s next for touchless 3D design?

At Leap Motion, we’ve been amazed by how many people from around the world have been inspired by the possibilities of our technology. They want to free themselves, and the rest of us, from the current limitations of computing interfaces. Last week, we joined many of these visionaries at the annual SF MusicTech Summit, which brings together some of the biggest names in the music, business, and tech scene together under one roof.

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Over the past year, we’ve had a great time working with awesome people at Google on a variety of uses for the Leap Motion technology. On April 22, the Google Earth team announced support for Leap Motion (video here), which is now available to anyone (right now, our early access developers) that has a Leap Motion Controller plus the desktop version of Google Earth.

We’re excited to see the #LeapInto Google Earth experiences from our developer community, and now Google has asked us to share the fun with attendees during Google I/O May 15-17 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

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Today we held a live Ustream with our co-founders, Michael and David. Hundreds of our community members attended, but many more could not make it. Below the break is a full (lengthy) transcript of the 30-minute conversation.

For quick reference, a summary of the questions David and Michael answered:

1. You have 600,000 devices sitting around. Are you dumping these or is this a software issue?

2. How about giving people an option? Magic = wait until July, non-magic = send it sooner.

3. How do I become a beta tester?

4. How much does HP or ASUS affect this decision?

5. How will you address market traction loss from this delay, Kinect 2 and others that are coming soon?

6. You’ve already changed your dates before, how do you know you won’t delay again?

7. I still want to see an official video showing off Windows 8 support.

8. Why won’t you let developers purchase a device now and access the SDK?

9. But even a long beta test won’t bring you a 100% product. Just release it for Kickstarter and skip the stores and the public. (note, we are not a Kickstarter)

10. What will happen next year after you go in to HP? Will you go into mobile next?

11. Do you have a date for releasing the beta test for developers? More details please.

12. Can you please allow access to cloud points in SDK?

13. Would it be better to order from Amazon UK or Leap directly?

14. As a customer not a developer, how can I be part of the beta testing? You said a small number of people would be able to.

15. How many apps do you predict will be available at the time of the new launch date?

16. Are you planning on building a bluetooth device at a later date?

17. Will it work with a multiple monitor setup?

18. How are you going to reward early pre-order customers?

19. Is the delay coming from pressure from HP or other partners?

20. Why did you wait so long to tell us about the delay?

21. How does this impact the big deals with Best Buy and HP?

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