Leaping ahead with gesture recognition for VR head sets


Leap Motion CTO David Holz recently announced on their blog the launch of a Virtual Reality Headset Mount for their hand-tracking controller that works with Oculus VR's Developer Kit 2. For those not familiar with the Leap Motion controller, see one of my earlier posts about it or visit the Leap Motion website.




As one sees in the video, the controller mounted to the front of the Oculus will allow immersive applications and games to track the hands and fingers.


leap motion oculus rift Now I have seen this setup before where a developer took a Leap Motion controller, an Oculus Rift Dev Kit, and some 'Arkansas chrome' aka duct tape to create this same type of experience, but it is great to see Leap Motion give some design to the mount and software support in their V2 SDK for head units.

This is a huge win for bumping up the levels of immersion for a relatively low cost. The VR mount costs $19.99, requires Leap Motion’s $80 controller, and of course a $350 Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 (DK2) to be of any use.



There are already some VR demo applications here on their website to try out and they have an open submission for new content to registered Leap Motion developers. I anticipate the developer community will go crazy with this and make some killer gesture interfaces and experiences.



Leap Motion VR - "The Leap Motion controller uses infrared stereo cameras as tracking sensors. You can access the images from these cameras using the Frame.Images function. This function provides an ImageList object, which contains the Image objects for the frame. We support image passthrough currently on native SDKs, but you can still use head-mounted top-down tracking in JavaScript and other WebSocket based solutions without the need for Image API." - from Leap Motion website

Make sure to check out the 12 FAQs About the VR Developer Mount on the company's blog and Leap Motion has also provided the 3D model of the head mount on GrabcCAD and Thingiverse for anyone to 3D print/digitally fabricate themselves.

This is a really exciting team up for virtual reality and I recommend any Oculus owner to upgrade their experience and buy the Leap Motion VR mount and controller. Well done David Holz and team, you truly are leaping us all into the future.




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