Leap Motion: Low Cost Gesture Control for Your Computer Display

Jessica Vascellaro, of the Wall Street Journal, reports about gesture,  motion. and even object control for computers, highlighting the work of  Leap Motion and Flutter.




Apparently the Leap Motion sensor is less expensive than Microsoft's Kinect. It can track movements down to 1/100 of a millimeter and can track fingers and movement. It handles interaction with 8 cubic feet of space.


Below is a video from the Leap Motion website:






RELATED
Leap FAQs
Leap Motion Developer Kit Application
Leap Motion: 3D hands-free motion control, unbound
Daniel Terdiman, CNET, 5/20/12
FYI:  Do a search and you'll find many more articles and posts about Leap Motion!

NUITEQ's Latest Multitouch Showreel: Snowflake Suite

I've been following a number of people that have been working in the area of natural user interfaces and interaction for many years.  An example of this work is NUITEQ, a company lead by Harry van deer Veen.  Below is NUITEQ's most recent show reel of Snowflake Suite, an off-the-shelf multitouch SDK.


Here is the description of the software from the naturaluserinterface YouTube channel:


"NUITEQ's award-winning multitouch software product Snowflake Suite comes off the shelf with 30+ apps, a free SDK to develop your own multitouch software apps and its content is easy to customize. The solution is offers high performance, stability, quality and comes with dedicated support. Apps includes presentation, productivity and creativity tools as well as games. The software can be used in different scenarios such as corporate presentations, exhibitions, entertainment, education, public spaces, consumer electronics, retail and digital signage."

FYI: Tutorials about the user of Snowflake Suite can be found on the naturaluserinterface YouTube channel. 


Harry van der Veen has been sharing his NUI journey journey since 2007 on his Multitouch blog.

Monday Musing and Meanderings: Interesting videos and links about emerging technologies.

INTERACTIVE TANGIBLE TABLETOP MUSIC


Reactable Live! SubMixPro Studio Torino

The Reactable featured in the above video is used for DJ-ing in clubs. The one I've played with is at the science museum in my area - I love it. It is fun to improvise on the Reactable with another person.  For more information, see my previous blog posts featuring the Reactable.

AUGMENTED REALITY
While listening to CNBC on my satellite radio on the way home today,  I heard that investing in Qualcomm might be a good idea.   I wonder if this means that Wall Street analysts think that  AR will become mainstream soon...   


The video below shows a variety of creative AR game applications:


Qualcomm has an AR SDK that comes with tutorials, samples, an API reference, and developer forums. The SDK can be downloaded from the Qualcomm AR web-page.

For more information:

GDC 11:  AR- The Augmented Future of Mobile Serious Games?  Eliane Alhadeff, Serious Games Market, 3/7/11

Qualcomm Augmented Reality Research

Qualcomm Extends Augmented Reality with Unity Technologies

Qualcomm's secret mobile weapon:  Augmented Reality Robert Enderle,  TG Daily, 2/24/11

This sort of technology has been around for a while. For an example, take a look at  the 2007 MScape game demo of the AR game, Roku's Reward:

THE KINECT FOR MEDICAL DATA VISUALIZATION 

Here is another use of augmented reality, but this time, harnessing the Kinect:

Magic Mirror for Medical Data Visualization using Kinect

Madhav K. ,  Kinecthacks 

Public Presentation of mirracle

PHOTOELASTIC TOUCH

Transparent Rubbery Interface using a LCD and Photoelasticity
Toshiki Sato, Haruko Mamiya, Taro Tokui, Hideki Koike,  The Unversity of Electro-Communications;  Kentaro Fukuchi, Japan Science and Technology Agency
Abstract (pdf)


ART AND SCREENS

Nomad capacitive brush turns your iPhone into an art canvas for $24.00
Darren Murph, Engadget, 2/22/11

Nomad Brush for the iPad from Don Lee on Vimeo.