When creating new demos for the Leap Motion Controller, the first question I tend to ask myself is: ‘How can I create something that was not possible to make before?’ This line of thought tends to lead me to a place of wondering how I can make a spaceship that lets me wing suit base jump on the moons of Jupiter, but sometimes it just makes me want to create a demo. One of the things that really excites me about the Leap Motion Controller is the extra dimension of interaction, especially when it pertains to 3D objects.
All of this made me decide to create a program that let you manipulate the mesh of a sphere. If you have a Leap Motion Controller, the program is available at http://cabbibo.com/leap/meshGallery/
As many people who I’ve talked to who are programming with the Leap Motion Controller have told me, one of the bigger issues that you have to solve is how to start and stop a motion. In the case of mesh manipulation this is especially difficult, because the way that you begin or end a motion cannot affect the placement of the vertex you are moving.
In the end there were a few things I did to try and solve this problem.
The first was to make it so that the ‘plucker’ which would attach itself to a vertex, would be a point that lay directly in the middle of the two ‘finger markers’, as seen in the screen shot below.
