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)

Window management abstraction


At this point in the program we now know that the user performed a tap and we know exactly which screen coordinates they were pointing at when tapping. What we want to do now is to see if a window is positioned at the screen coordinates of the pointable ray intersection. Our driver will take care of the platform-specific details.

        flingerWinRef win = driver->getWindowAt(screenLoc.x, screenLoc.y);
        if (win == NULL)
            continue;

        currentWin = win;

The job of getWindowAt(x, y) is to query the window manager and determine if the point falls within the bounds of any windows onscreen, and if so, which window is frontmost. If a window is located, an opaque reference to it is returned and we can stash it away later, in order to move and resize the selected window when we receive the appropriate hand motions.

Firstly, we need a simple and intuitive interface for our user to indicate where they would like the window to sit in the virtual...