With one of the largest Leap Motion communities on the planet, Japan is an incredible source of 3D interactive creations. A photo hackathon of epic proportions. Three unique web apps. Two Airspace experiments from game designer Eddie Lee. A Leap Motion-driven industrial album and biometric beatboxing. And that’s just scratching the surface!

This week, we’re looking at how Japanese developers and artists have been inspired by 3D interaction. But first, some great news for Japanese Leap Motion lovers. With the Japanese retail launch of the Leap Motion Controller, you can now find our technology in SoftBank BB stores throughout Japan.

But that’s only half of the good news. Leap Motion is becoming more global than ever, so we recently added a new language translations feature to the Airspace Store. In honor of our Japanese launch, we’re introducing the feature with full Japanese support. Want to check it out? Scroll down to the bottom of the Airspace Store and use the dropdown menu. Now, onwards!

3 Web Apps from Japanese Developers

Time Travel

After winning at last month’s Japan Photo Hack Day, the creators of Time Travel have brought their interactive web app to Airspace. Reach into the past and explore photos of your search topics and interests, and twirl your finger to move time forwards or backwards.

Reach out on the web »

The Nikkei: Japanese Newspaper

The financial world at your fingertips. Featuring high-quality reporting and in-depth analysis, The Nikkei is a Japanese-language newspaper that covers economic and business news. With a subscription to the Nikkei online edition, you can access the latest news and archives at leap.nikkei.com.

Videogram

Watch and discover your favorite videos. Videogram pulls the best scenes from a video to create summaries in pictures that can be searched and curated. With a wave of your hand, Videogram lets you browse and explore videos as easily as photos.

Reach out on the web »

2 Experimental Games from Eddie Lee

Lotus

As you saw in our video, Eddie Lee is inspired by music and nature to create fun, playful experiences with the latest technologies. Lotus is a quirky set of interactive musical toys that lets you dynamically create your own cool sounds.

Download free for Mac and Windows »

Kyoto

Feeling contemplative? Dip into the mysterious and melancholy world of Kyoto. Mind-melting ambient music and beautiful visuals reveal an intuitive puzzle that you play with your hands. Just like the city itself, it’s a magical experience that will never leave you.

Download free for Mac and Windows »

Musical Experiments with Leap Motion Interaction

Tokyo DJ’s Industrial Leap Motion Album

Launched in October, Tokyo-based industrial artist Aliceffekt’s album Telekinetic was the first known album release created with the Leap Motion Controller. By translating hand movements into retro-futuristic sounds, Aliceffekt created the full 20-minute ambient album with 3D interaction as his main instrument.

Read more »

Humanelectro: Biometric Beatboxing

At a live event in Tokyo called ∑(SIGMA), Ryo Fujimoto created live audio and visuals from electrical sensors hooked to his body, along with the Leap Motion Controller, which tracked his finger positions in real time.

What inspires you to create? We’d love to hear about how you use the Leap Motion Controller to express yourself. Let us hear your story on Twitter @LeapMotion or on Facebook.

Interactive art helps us extract impulses from our brains, thread by thread, and enact them in the world. Music takes this medium into mind-bending heights. What if we were able to transform any surface into a living, breathing musical instrument? Emerging designer and musician Felix Faire recently did just that with Contact, an acoustic Leap Motion experiment created for the Royal Academy’s “Sensing Spaces” exhibition.

As a first-year architecture student, Faire was struck by how listening to musical progressions as you walk through a space affects the way you move, so he designed an entire concert hall and gallery in the linear structure of a sonata. These initial musings grew into a much larger project on spatial music perception entitled “Music Aided Design.” It was then that coding became an integral part of Felix’s creative life, and he knew 3D motion control would become an essential exploratory engine for his thesis.

“The fidelity of the Leap Motion made me realize this kind of device could track even more subtle musical articulations, and perhaps even be used as a three-dimensional instrument in itself,” Faire told us. “Now I understand more of what is possible with Leap Motion. I have ambitions to try much more complex gestures and motions in future projects.”

For Contact, Felix used hand height, finger count, and a squeezing gesture to trigger various effects in the loop – the visual output influencing how the audience attempt to interact with the sound waves. “Abstract audiovisual synchronicity, while extremely elusive, can be a very exciting and compelling experience,” Felix concluded.

“Sensing Spaces” will continue to run at the Royal Academy in London through April 6th, 2014. It features architectural practices from six countries spanning four continents. If you plan to attend, be sure to tweet impressions, images, or video from your experience to @LeapMotion using the hashtag #SensingSpaces.

We’ve talked about the magic of WebGL before – how it unleashes the power of the web to do incredible things in 3D. With this latest experiment from Bartek Drozdz, you can reach into your browser and play with a variety of cool visuals to music. A liquid gem, cityscape, spherical lines, and more, all responding to Codex Machine’s S.P.Y. or even your own microphone.

As the creative director at Tool of North America, a production company based in Santa Monica, Bartek brings interactive digital experiences to life. Last month, Tool decided to throw a party for its employees and friends in a large building known locally as “the shed.” To bring some WebGL zest to the party, Bartek started working on sound-reactive visuals that would project on a wall – using the huge space to his advantage.

Next, Bartek took it a step further by introducing Leap Motion interaction to the setup. As you can see (and experience) for yourself, the results were spectacular. You can fly and steer between buildings, create strange wave reactions, or change your point of view. Each mode is different, and it can be challenging to discover what they all do. It’s all part of the fun.

“Part of the challenge was that we did not want to put any instructions anywhere, so we had to do something that was intuitive,” says Bartek. “Just let people know that they can hover the device with their hand and see what happens. It made people curious, but was also easy to use. Our guests could interact with the visuals using one hand, and holding a drink in another.”

The web is growing all the time. With these kinds of early experiments, we can catch a glimpse into what the future web might look like – with complex 3D sights and sounds created with little more than JavaScript and the magic of WebGL shaders.

Want to dive into Bartek’s trippy experience of sight and sound? You can check out his live demo on Tool’s website. To use Leap Motion on the web, be sure that you’ve checked the “Allow Web Apps” box in the Leap Motion Control Panel (General tab). As always, we recommend Google Chrome.

What do you imagine we’ll see in the web of the future? Let us know in the comments below, or give us a shout on Facebook and Twitter.

When digital art and physical sculptures are melded together, the resulting creation can be spectacular and strange. Recently, visitors to an exhibition at Eyebeam, an NYC-based art and technology center, discovered what happens when you throw 3D interaction into the mix. You become an artist yourself – creating between the real and unreal. You become part of Ascension.

The exhibit was a collaboration between multimedia artist William Ismael and sculptor Carrie Mae Rose. At Hackerloop, an innovation lab and hardware playground, William has been developing interactive experiences to bring rooms to life. Carrie Mae is known for her evocative sculptures that shock and endanger – working in wire, scissors, and razor blades.

Ascension reflects their different backgrounds – bringing together a hand-built tetrahedral wing structure with digital animations and motion control to become something new. Recently, we caught up with William to ask about his creative process and the work that went into creating Ascension. Plus, a preview of his next installation, Visual Composer – which lets him generate live visuals with his fingers.

Ascension

Starting Point: Inspiration

My biggest visual influences are nature, the sky, the ocean, the cosmos, sacred geometry, architecture, mathematics, and human-built objects. What inspired me to use Leap Motion was the possibility of using our main manual tools as human beings – our hands – to generate animated art, in real physical spaces, in real time. It personalizes the spatial experience because people become co-creators of the space in a very intuitive way.

With the Leap Motion Controller, people become co-creators of the space in a very intuitive way.

Installations bring people together in a physical space, so using the Leap Motion Controller for the Ascension installation made it not just art to look at, but something reactive – in a unique co-creative experience. Leap Motion control was critical in giving people the power of triggering and controlling the animations of the projection mapping. Its precision when it came to subtle movements and the use of fingers made it the right device to use.

Creative Process

Incorporating 3D motion-controlled projection mapping onto the 3-dimensional angel-winged sculpture on the wall was a very technical process, involving trials and successes. My first spatial experience with Leap Motion was not for a space, but an interactive art app for the desktop as a way to test it right away.

For Ascension, first I programmed an interactive animation on my desktop, where Leap Motion was used to control it with my hands. I played with it on my MacBook Pro until I got to a place that felt right. Colors were vibrating and forms were interlocking – all by waving my hands in the air.

The next step was mapping the 3D structure through the projector. Using Processing with MadMapper, I ran a code-generated 3D animation, with the interactive animation triggered by Leap Motion interaction on top of it. Finally, I ran up and down the stairs for an entire week to problem-solve and adjust the details. Two projectors were used in the final installation.

Visual Composer

William’s experiment with Ascension led to his next project – a visual composer that brings together psychedelic colors with splattering paint and abstract geometry. While it’s still in development, William hopes to take Visual Composer to the next level as a live performance tool.

3D Motion Control & Performance

The ability to control motion graphics in a space with my body movements does not just change performance – it creates a new type of performance. The way coded animations precisely sync to my movements gives life to a new human experience through the way Leap Motion is used. I can now perform to a crowd live on a large stage with my movements creating real-time visuals. It’s extremely exciting.

An interactive room can be life-changing. It affects people emotionally…. It’s not happening on a screen, but in real life in a real space, where our senses are the most sensitive.

I think 3D motion control can radically turn a normal room into a living world – where we, as humans, affect the environment with a wave of our arms. An interactive room can be life-changing. It affects people emotionally. We’re affected by every detail of our environment. By creating such a space, people can be taken instantly to an incredible journey. It’s not happening on a screen, but in real life in a real space, where our senses are the most sensitive.

From high-concept art and storytelling to virtual objects and drone experiments – where would you like to take Leap Motion interaction? Let us know your favorite experiments with art, music, and design on Facebook and Twitter.

With the rise of new 3D web technologies, many of the most amazing Leap Motion apps live entirely online. This week, reach into Chrome and explore intricate virtual anatomy models. Plus, challenge your friends and the computer to a real-time game of geodetic shapes, destroy evil demons in a mysterious labyrinth, and create your own classic sound synthesis.

Biodigital Human™

Explore the body in an immersive 3D visualizer. Featuring thousands of medically accurate anatomy objects, BioDigital Human™ lives entirely in your browser. Discover what lies beneath the skin with tissue dissection and detailed cross-sections.

BioDigital Human™ runs on the latest 3D web technologies. As always, we recommend Chrome for all Leap Motion web apps. You can see the full list of system requirements on the app’s Airspace Store page.

Reach on the web »

Cyx

Defeat your opponent in a real-time geodetic tic-tac-toe experience. Cyx is a race to complete one of four shapes before your computer (or another player) does. Unlock higher levels and discover the secret advantage of pentagons.

Download free for Mac and Windows »

Dark Soul: Path of Awakening

Step into the Darkness labyrinth to shoot your way through catacombs, underground laboratories, and 14 levels of monster-fueled hell. Dark Soul: Path of Awakening takes you through a violent dreamscape where demons hide in the dark. Fight them with shotguns, M16s, and your own growing demonic powers. (Rated for gamers 16 and up.)

Download for Windows »

Memorix 3D

Train your brain by flipping boxes and searching for matching pairs in this classic memory-building game. Designed for children and families, Memorix 3D includes three different gameplay levels, along with fun animations and sounds.

Download for Mac and Windows »

Animal Zoo

Discover animal sounds with your toddler. Animal Zoo features cute, colorful animals that make sounds when you grab their picture.

Download for Mac »

Syntheremin

Create your own old-school sound synthesis. Syntheremin fuses a synthesizer and theremin to let you generate your own Moog-style music, along a waveform analyzer that lets you see and hear how your actions affect the sound.

Download for Mac »

PRSNTA

Create and showcase beautiful fullscreen presentations of your images and PDF files. PRSNTA features slide navigation and a virtual pointer to help you highlight important points.

Download free for Mac »

TomBraining The Gallery

Dive into the classics with TomBraining The Gallery. Stroll through a world of classical art and music, featuring insightful narration along with a game mode that tests your knowledge and memory. Narrated by actor Brian Protheroe with analysis from a celebrated art historian, it’s an oasis of artistic expression and high culture.

Download for Mac »

At a recent exhibition called Resortes, visitors to Mexico City’s Digital Cultural Center walked into a large room to be confronted by… nothing. A horizontal white line line projected against a silent surface, with a pair of Leap Motion Controllers mounted on either side.

“When the audience entered the installation, they didn’t have any clue how to interact with the piece – we wanted them to figure out how to control the piece without a guide,” says Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, one of Resortes’ creators. “Most people when they enter the installation didn’t know that they could activate the sensors – so when they did, some of them jumped!”

When the installation sprang to life, people quickly discovered that they could create huge waves of light and music with hand gestures. Elastic strings built on Newtonian physics and generated by the participants’ hand movements danced frantically between a set of particle nodes, shifting in color and tones to the sound of strange, otherworldly music.

With two people at the controls, the sounds and visuals generated by each person combined to form a massive composition. After the participants withdrew their hands, the giant strings continued to reverberate, throwing off light and sound for several minutes – like the dying vibrations of a digital guitar string:

Ironically, says Thomas, despite being a touchless device, the Leap Motion Controller made the installation possible by creating the illusion of touch. “We wanted the audience to feel that they could control a string with their bare hands and manipulate the physics of the environment. The Leap Motion device helps to create different forms of expression with art and technology, and I think if we had used another device we wouldn’t have had the same interaction.”

Want to create your own technicolor light displays? You can take control into your hands with particle apps like Midnight, Beautiful Chaos, and Gravilux. Let us know your favorite Leap Motion physics experiment – tweet us @LeapMotion or jump onto our Facebook page.

Imagery, video, text – whatever its form, ephemeral media is a thrill to experience because it’s forever fleeting. Teeming with the threat that if you look away, even for a second, you could miss it entirely. With his completely improvised performances, Russian-based musician Anton Maskeliade brings this elusive principle into the genres of electronica and contemporary pop. Using his whole body, he creates new soundscapes on the spot with 3D MIDI controllers and bit-crushed drum machines. Never the same song twice.

On the hunt for a tool that would help make his live shows more spectacular and interactive, he discovered Leap Motion. “During my live performances, I feel like a wizard making magic,” he says. “It’s incredible feeling, like I can materialize the music with my hands. Leap Motion puts interaction in a new level. The artist becomes more interesting for the audience to look at.”

Using an AKAI MPD32 Controller, Maskeliade connects his Leap Motion Controller with Ableton to reach into musical streams and control the flow. “Using the Geco MIDI plugin,” he says, “I can easily choose the exact parameter the Leap Motion will change or trigger.” In the video at the top of this post, you can see Anton performing a live piece on Russia’s Electrichka Train. (You can also listen to the original track that he created on his Soundcloud.)

However, Maskeliade’s performances with Leap Motion go beyond Geco MIDI. With his background in projection, web, and graphic design, he’s used the device to directly manipulate visual experiences with Resolume 4 VJ Software. “My live set has diverse ‘spells’ with video synchronization. It looks really astonishing. When an absolutely new wave of technology suddenly becomes available for everyday people, it develops humanity – it expands the mind and enhances the senses.

“I’m happy to be a part of it.”

From the US and Australia to Tokyo, Israel, and Berlin, musicians and DJs used the Leap Motion Controller to tweak and transform music in a whole new way. By reaching above the device in studios, concert halls, and dance clubs, they were able to interact directly with music streams and create whole new sounds. Just in time for the New Year, here are the top six Leap Motion music videos of 2013.

Two-Handed Live Orchestra

Can one person play an entire live orchestra with only two hands? Using GecoMIDI, Hagai Davidoff – an Israeli film and theater composer, producer, and arranger – was able to dynamically control the flow of a full classical ensemble through natural hand and finger movements.

Classical Piano Reimagined

Yehezkel Raz is a classically trained musician with a passion for electronic music. Over the last 10 years, he’s been experimenting with new ways to integrate the piano with live electronic instruments and computers. During a live piano performance in September, he collaborated with electronic musician Danski to create a fusion of classic and electronic sounds – tweaking and distorting classical notes with Leap Motion technology.

Biometric Beatboxing with Humanelectro

After his early beatboxing experiment with the Leap Motion Controller, Ryo Fujimoto took his work with touchless technology to a bigger stage. At a live event in Tokyo called ∑(SIGMA), he created live audio and visuals from electrical sensors hooked to his body, which tracked his heart rate and muscle movements – along with the Leap Motion Controller, which tracked his finger positions in real time.

Drop the Bass with Leap Motion Dubstep

This live remix performance from Jerusalem producer and DJ Uriel Yehezkel also features GecoMIDI’s power and versatility in a variety of genres. “You can really feel the parameters you’re changing with your hands. You can flow with the music and express it with your body. Controlling more than 10 parameters simultaneously with both hands provides you with full control over the construction of the song, the emotion, and the energy.” Read more »

DJ SelArom Reaches into the Beat

Electronic musician DJ SelArom uses the Leap Motion music app GecoMIDI to create a fluid, expressive sound. “Whether you’re playing your own music or playing someone else’s music, it’s a written track. It’s a done deal, it’s going to come out the way it was produced. Leap Motion lets you add a layer on top of that – so that every time you do it, it’s going to be different. You’re not just controlling the music, you’re now part of the music.” Read more »

Tokyo DJ’s Album Created with Leap Motion

Released in October, industrial artist Aliceffekt’s retro-futuristic ambient album Telekinetic was the first known album release created with the Leap Motion Controller as its main instrument. You can see him in action with at Tokyo Indie Dance Party in the video below or listen to the album on Aliceffekt’s website.

“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.” Read more »

Want to start your own music creation journey with the Leap Motion Controller? It all starts in the Airspace Store’s music and entertainment category – where you can find everything from virtual instruments like Chordion Conductor and AirBeats to professional-grade tools like GecoMIDI.

What’s your favorite musical moment of 2013? Tweet us @LeapMotion, post on our Facebook page, or join the chorus on our 2013 retrospectacular forum thread.

This week in Airspace, we’ve nearly doubled our apps since launching in July, with over 150 titles for you to discover. These include 3 brand-new web links, 3 Windows games, and a new standalone app for sound designers and professional musicians.

Web Links

To use Leap Motion on the web, make sure your device’s green light is on, and that you’ve checked the “Allow Web Apps” box in the Leap Motion Control Panel (General tab). We recommend Google Chrome for web apps.

Grooveshark

Reach into over 15 million songs and the largest online community of music lovers on the web. With Grooveshark, you can access and create playlists, listen to genre-based radio stations, and control your music with a wave of your hand. Check it out »

PhotoScape

Now available on the web, PhotoScape is an immersive browsing experience that puts the world’s photos in your hands. Explore your own photos or browse public image streams – including photography, architecture, design, landscapes, and art. Check it out »

Videogram

Experience a new way to browse, discover, and watch YouTube videos. Videogram pulls the best scenes from each video to create interactive pictorial summaries – so you can explore videos with the same ease and simplicity as photos. Check it out »

Games

Ragdoll Run

Compete against the world in this exhilarating free-runner hit for Windows Phone, now available in the Airspace Store for Windows. Customize your ragdoll and access unique abilities with colorful 3D graphics and intuitive, gesture-based gameplay. Get the app »

Whack A Mole

Moles have infested your yard – but this time, they mean business. Pound waves of enemies into submission and put out fires with nothing but a boxing glove and watering can. Get the app »

Wingsuit Infinity Flyer

Dive into the breathtaking world of wingsuit flying and soar through a challenging obstacle course with Wingsuit Infinity Flyer for Windows. Master the art of flight by flying further and collecting bonuses. Get the app »

Music & Entertainment

WaveWarper

Control sound in real time with WaveWarper, a standalone music app that lets you combine and loop up to six sound layers to create a single dynamic file. From there, you can use your Leap Motion Controller to create custom whoosh, Doppler, and passby effects. Get the app »

Imagine reaching into a song and tweaking it with your fingers, without anything getting in the way. In our latest spotlight video, electronic musician DJ SelArom shows how it’s possible with the Leap Motion Controller and GecoMIDI.

GecoMIDI is a powerful music app that gives musicians like DJ SelArom the power to reach out and control the flow of their music. Designed for live performance and quick configuration by music professionals, it allows each hand to access a wide variety of customizable control streams. GecoMIDI with Leap Motion control works alongside DJ SelArom’s existing setup – augmenting traditional controls to create something new.

Moving his hands above the device, DJ SelArom is able to create a smooth electro-industrial sound without touching anything. It’s a fluid, expressive way to make music with natural hand movements:

Whether you’re playing your own music or playing someone else’s music, it’s a written track. It’s a done deal, it’s going to come out the way it was produced. Leap Motion lets you add a layer on top of that – so that every time you do it, it’s going to be different. You’re not just controlling the music, you’re now part of the music.

How do you like to express your creativity with the Leap Motion Controller? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter.