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)

Driver implementation – Mac OS X


Details of the Mac OS X window flinger driver are provided here for completeness. It does not relate to the Leap Motion per se, but it does provide a useful and interesting illustration of the layer of platform-specific details and implementation. Skip ahead if you don't care about the gruesome details of manipulating OS X windows.

Accessibility API

Regrettably, OS X does not provide an API for directly accessing the attributes of windows not owned by the current application, which sort of throws a wrench into our plan to fling windows. It does, however, furnish developers with a library for generic property setters and accessors of UI elements for the purposes of accessibility, enabling applications to provide alternative methods of interface feedback for vision- or hearing-impaired users. Examples of this could be an application that speaks the current window title, or changing button labels to be large and high-contrast.

The AX API, as it is known, allows...