Developer Labs

In my never-ending quest to figure out the ‘best’ way to interact with the Leap Motion Controller, I find a lot of my thoughts focusing on camera movements. In the case of the Universe of Sound, this meant flying from galaxy to galaxy by holding your hand flat, but I also wanted to explore other methods of camera movements.

In this post, we’ll be looking at my Translation Camera experiment. As usual, please use Google Chrome to view this experiment. Try moving your hand around to change the field position, or if you want to think about it differently, change the camera position. To me, the controls seem simple enough, but try it out and let me know if it feels that way to you.

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Data is beautiful, there is no denying it. It might be hard to see this beauty when its in a JSON file or *shudders* an Excel spreadsheet, but data is immaculate. If you don’t believe me, check out a few of the examples from D3JS.org.

For me, one of the most exciting parts of the Leap Motion Controller is that it allows access to near-infinite data. I’ve talked with the ultimate homie Kai (who is responsible for this brilliant piece of dataVis) about this, and he made an analogy to the Leap Motion field being like a pool of data that you dip your hands into. I have always loved this analogy, mostly because a pool of data sounds refreshing.

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Creating interfaces is really difficult. It’s especially difficult when you are making interfaces for something that has not been researched before. The way you interact with the computer is different if you are using a trackpad, mouse, or touchscreen – and especially a Leap Motion Controller. Some actions are easier, and others are harder, so each interface should be made with these restrictions and freedoms in mind.

For the Circle of Aww demo (which you can see on my website, CSS3D required), I wanted to try creating an interface that used only the gestures given to us by the leap.gestures array. I really think that a 3D input device requires a 3D interface, while information is still easier to consume in 2 dimensions. In this way, I believe that navigation in 3 dimensions, and consumption in 2 dimensions, is probably the best approach to creating an interface.

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What wouldn’t have been possible without the Leap Motion Controller?

Every time I start a new project, this is the first question I ask myself. The answer is of course infinite, but to try and parse that infinity into a simple answer is always more difficult than I first expect. Many times, I’ll try to think about what another application looks like in ‘Leap Space’. For example, think about the game Snake. It may be the most simplistic application in the world, but what exactly would it look like in ‘Leap Space’?

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Scrolling is awesome. It might seem like a trivial task to us because we do it so often, but when you stop to think about it, the ability to scroll absolutely changed the game of interfaces. It allows the user to read more without having a jarring page change, and lets you hold near-infinite material in a finite amount of space. Kinda like the TARDIS. The only problem with scrolling is that you need a way to navigate it.

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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.

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