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)

The Leap Motion service


The Leap Motion service is an application running as a daemon on Unix-style platforms (Mac OS X and Linux) and as a service on Windows. Its job is to communicate with the controller hardware devices over USB, post-process frames of hand- and scene-tracking information, and then make this data available to API clients in their native formats. When we use the C++ API to create our frame data Listener , it is really communicating with the Leap Motion service behind the scenes, which is why the service must already be started by the user for our Listener to receive any updates. In the case of our client-side JavaScript code, the frame data is transmitted over a socket, although the details of that communication are still hidden by the consumer of the Leap API.