Leap Motion Makes Cheap Kinect Clone 100X more Accurate

And it costs a mere $69.99. Leap Motion is a startup based out of San Francisco, and their dream is to make gesture control something we can actually use.

If you’ve ever used a Kinect, you probably noticed that, while it is an impressive technology demonstration, you can’t actually do that much with it. Gesture support is finicky at best, and there are always those stories about the games playing themselves (this is a classic example of that, and the new Star Wars game’s lightsaber combat works just as well if you flail as if you pretend to actually use a sword). But with Leap Motion’s tech, that could be a thing of the past. And best of all? It’s priced cheap enough to be used by hackers for their projects.

The accuracy of the new device works down to the hundredth of a millimeter, meaning that it is accurate enough to track each finger individually. That’s good enough to implement pinch to zoom. All this from a device that plugs into any computer via a USB cable.

CEO Michael Buckwald explained to CNet what the company is hoping to achieve with its tech:

"We want there to be world-changing applications that fundamentally transform how people interact with their operating system or browse the Web.... The goal is to fundamentally transform how people interact with computers and to do so in the same way that the mouse did, which means that the transformation affects everyone, both from the most basic use case all the way up to the most advanced use cases you can imagine for computing technology."

They might just do it, too. At $70 it is cheap enough for everyone to buy one. For example, me, for my HTPC.

Gizmodo Photo by : LEAP Motion