LEAP Motion experiences and plans
So I have been able to play with my LEAP motion dev Board for quite a while now, so allow me to write about some of my experiments.
Mouse Control
Curious as I am, I started a small utility to make the Leap control my mouse on windows. I know this is probably double work, since the final Leap board will be integrated with the OS, but I was just curious on how this could be done. My findings? It’s pretty difficult to accurately move the mouse around in “regular windows”: the icons are too small to point at and clicking, which I integrated by making a small circle gesture was pretty difficult.
On the other hand; in Windows 8’s “tile mode”, using the Leap was pretty intuitive; the tiles were large enough to select using the circle gesture.
Gaming
Something completely different; Gaming. Using Blender‘s Game engine, I have created a small game which is playable using the Leap Motion. It’s just a small example of what is possible when using the Leap Motion for games. For example, the ball’s movement is now locked on the Z axis; unlocking the Z-axis would add a whole new dimension to the game (and would probably make it incredibly difficult).
How to get Leap to work with Blender
Other developers might be interested in how to get Blender (on Windows) to work with the Leap, so I wrote down a small howto. I’m not sure if I can share this stuff, so I’ll keep it vague on purpose:
- Install x86 version of Blender (works best)
- Relative to Blender.exe, put LeapPython.pyd in Python/lib directory
- Put Leap.dll in the same directory as Blender.exe
- Now you’re able to acces the Leap SDK from Blender, try typing “import Leap” in the Python console.
- From this point on, you can use the sample.py file to find out how to access Leap stuff from Python, or you can ask in the forum 😉
Next steps; Haptic Feedback
So what I want to do the upcoming time is find out if I can connect interactions on screen with some physical form of feedback. Haptic feedback in this case is very suitable, since it’s the hand that interacts with the virtual objects on screen, so it should be the hand that receives the feedback. I’ll post more about this as I progress…