Book Image

Leap Motion Development Essentials

By : Mischa Spiegelmock
Book Image

Leap Motion Development Essentials

By: Mischa Spiegelmock

Overview of this book

Leap Motion is a company developing advanced motion sensing technology for human–computer interaction. Originally inspired by the level of difficulty of using a mouse and keyboard for 3D modeling, Leap Motion believe that moulding virtual clay should be as easy as moulding clay in your hands. Leap Motion now focus on bringing this motion sensing technology closer to the real world. Leap Motion Development Essentials explains the concepts and practical applications of gesture input for developers who want to take full advantage of Leap Motion technology. This guide explores the capabilities available to developers and gives you a clear overview of topics related to gesture input along with usable code samples. Leap Motion Development Essentials shows you everything you need to know about the Leap Motion SDK, from creating a working program with gesture input to more sophisticated applications covering a range of relevant topics. Sample code is provided and explained along with details of the most important and central API concepts. This book teaches you the essential information you need to design a gesture-enabled interface for your application, from specific gesture detection to best practices for this new input. You will be given guidance on practical considerations along with copious runnable demonstrations of API usage which are explained in step-by-step, reusable recipes.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Natural gestures


The most natural modes of gestures are sadly infeasible as far as normal software is concerned. Humans express themselves best when they are engaged in multimodal communication, as in speaking aided by gestures and facial expressions. There has been quite a bit of progress made in speech recognition and detection of emotions, but making use of the gestural information that people convey in everyday speech requires some creative interpretation and understanding of human languages that is beyond the reach of applications today.

A similar problem arises with using sign language, another very natural human-oriented mode of gestural communication. Signing, like speech, is multimodal; mouthing words along with the hand signs in order to accurately and expressively impart meaning to the symbols used to express one's thoughts. It is, likewise, not terribly useful for directing computers due to the fact that it requires a great deal of contextual information and suffers from the same...