“Shut up and take my money” we say to Leap — the US$70 Kinect-like device which replaces your mouse. But is it too good to be true?
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No actually, it’s as real as apples and rainbows but at least three times more life-affirming. From Leapmotion comes the Leap, and the company is so confident of its success that it’s saying “it’s like day one for the mouse.” More like it’s a super-cheap Kinect for PC. Rock on.
It’s the size of a flash drive, and is believed to be 200 times more accurate than a mouse. Leap also claims that it can “distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.” If this ain’t fancy, then nothing is.
Calibration is also said to take seconds. Plug the Leap into a spare USB port, wave your hands around like you just don’t care and boom, done.
Leap is a smart cookie. It can tell fingers from thumbs, pencils from bananas and wrap its head around most handheld items.
Leap’s had a rapid development cycle and in under four years, it’s managed to eke it’s way silently into the market.
The capabilities of the Leap seem endless. We can imagine first-person shooters the way they were meant to be played, with gun fingers! 3D-modelling will become a breeze and web browsing is going to take on a life of its own.
And oooh girl, developers get a free SDK to play around. Leap supports Mac and Windows (and Windows 8 in the future) as well as Linux in the near future. It’s a hackers dream toy.
Order it now, do it you crazy fool! First shipments are scheduled for December 2012 or, at the latest, January 2013.
