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)

Three.js + LeapJS – the awesomesauce


Deciding to use Three.js naturally introduces a dependency into our web client application, but when it comes to 3D programming, it's a very acceptable trade-off. One can think of it as the jQuery for 3D graphics, providing invaluable utilities and shortcuts for common tasks, while greatly enhancing fallback capabilities and smoothing over differences in implementations. LeapJS is naturally pretty useful as well for our purposes.

Let's take a look at combining the two. We can either download the Three.js library and include it locally, or we can link to the latest build hosted by GitHub (or elsewhere). While linking to the latest build is great, because we get the latest optimizations and bug fixes without doing any work at all, downloading the library is usually a better option; development is a tad faster (page reloads are slightly quicker without having to fetch the file from GitHub, especially if you are not geographically proximate to their servers...