Control your computer without touching it
Computer mouse, your days are numbered. Mouse-less computing is the
hot new tech frontier: laptops and tablets controlled by touch, voice,
eye-tracking and hand movements.
Gesture control is particularly hot, with smart TVs and lots of
experimental startups emerging on the scene. One of those startups,
Leap Motion, aims to bring the technology to the mass market with a new
Best Buy retail partnership.
Leap Motion, which has several Apple veterans in executive ranks, will sell a $70 controller at Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) starting in the spring. Pre-orders begin in February.
CNNMoney checked out the Leap Motion Controller during a demo at the
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week. A long list of
gesture-control companies were showing off their inventions at CES, but
Leap Motion's sophisticated system stood out.
The controller itself is an unassuming 3-inch-by-1-inch-by-0.5-inch
black box. Leap Motion can track the movements of all 10 fingers on
your hand down to 1/100th of a millimeter, which is smaller than the
tip of a pin. CNNMoney tried the system on a laptop, and the response
was lightning-fast, tracking movements at 290 frames per second.
That lack of
delay was a major priority in development, says Leap Motion co-founder
and CEO Mike Buckwald -- especially because the company wants its
technology to be in more than just your PC.
"Precision is
important, but it's also the lack of latency. Your brain gets confused
if what's on the screen isn't moving at essentially the same exact time
as your hand," Buckwald says. "If you want to use this on something
like robotic surgery, you need zero latency."
Robotic surgery could well be in Leap Motion's future, says company president and COO Andy Miller.
"We've had licensing talks in a lot of fields: autos, health care, even
fast food," Miller says. "We've been contacted by pretty much everyone
you can think of."
The rise of
mouse-less computing -- or as Miller puts it, a "disappearing user
interface" -- comes as consumers are getting used to device features
triggered by voice and gestures.
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