Can we ever be fully immersed in virtual reality if we’re constantly clutching a hunk of plastic to guide us? Hand-tracking company Leap Motion is trying to reckon with that very question. And the first step to solving it is going untethered and ridding of controllers completely.
use your own hands to interact, not controllers
In a blog post, Leap Motion has announced their upcoming Leap Motion Mobile Platform. It’s unclear yet what specific platforms Leap Motion will come to, but The Verge got to test out the platform from its embedded state in a future Samsung Gear VR. CEO Michael Buckwald told the site that Leap Motion’s untethered hand-tracking for mobile just might be the “iPhone moment for VR.” That is, in making VR accessible for a wider audience and capable of mainstream adoption, beyond technology aficionados or avid game players.
The Leap Motion Mobile Platform wants to bring intuitive controls to VR. From reaching out to poking and prodding things in your path—be they in virtual or augmented realities. The Leap Motion doesn’t have positional tracking, so leaning towards an object won’t do much, but it does track your hand movements from in front of its newly widened field of view. For the mobile platform, Leap Motion designed a new sensor and camera to widen the peripheral’s field of view. While Leap Motion’s PC hand-tracking remains at 140×120 degrees as its range, the mobile platform has been extended to 180×180.
Leap Motion will be showcasing their mobile platform to a number of “major VR events” soon, bringing along their Interaction Engine and Blocks demos to show the hand-tracking in action.
You can read more about the Leap Motion Mobile Platform on their blog, and stay tuned for more news on when it will reach mobile VR platforms, and what platforms specifically will host it.
