

The Leap Motion Controller Now Supports Linux - onosendai
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2013/03/the-leap-motion-controller-now-supports.html

======
mindstab
D: huh, kinda looks cool but I think I'd get tired of holding my hands up all
day :P

D: s'what keyboards, palm rests and elbow rests are for

S: yeah, i hear you

S: i played around with it for about 20 minutes and my arm was aching

So yeah. this is me being skeptical

~~~
skore
You know what? A year ago, I would have shared the exact same scepticism.

Now, I have an infant daughter who likes nothing more than being carried
around, which has exponentially increased the number of activities I do with
one hand, standing up.

Being able to have a soundless controller that you don't need to pick up or
fiddle around with in a way that disturbs a tiny human sleeping on your other
arm sounds like absolute perfection.

~~~
tezza
As the owner of a sizable 2.5 y/o I agree.

Also by the time you cary your Bundles of Love around day-to-day, your arm
strength for this type of HCI goes up substantially.

------
zmanian
Triggered a preorder...

Without a doubt I'm going to use a product less if I have to boot into
Windows...

~~~
Kiro
It's comments like this that reminds me why I would never use Linux on my
desktop.

~~~
StavrosK
Because you'll like it so much that you won't want to boot to an OS you like
less to use some stuff?

I guess that makes sense, it's also why I don't go to the amazing restaurant
nearby but go to the shitty one. Only the shitty restaurant has tacos, and
sometimes I want tacos.

------
jamesbritt
Specifically Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 12.10, or newer; the SDK is distributed as a
.deb file

~~~
14113
Also, specifically Ubuntu - it depends on a higher version of libc6 than is
available in everything up to and including unstable in Debian repositories,
it's only available in experimental.

~~~
voltagex_
Also known as Steam syndrome.

Does this trend worry anyone else? Limiting usage to one distro can't be a
good thing.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Hasn't stopped other distros from supporting Steam, with Valve's blessings no
less. I use Steam on my Arch Linux machines with zero issues.

~~~
gee_totes
I also a happy user of Steam on Fedora. I can run full-screen games just fine
(been playing Faster than Light recently).

------
lvs
Does anyone know why the Leap preorder page specifies a Phenom II or an
i3/i5/i7 processor in the fine-print hardware requirements? Is it for a
particular chip feature? Or is CPU overhead going to be a big issue?

~~~
simcop2387
Possibly for sse3, which i think was first in phenom ii for amd. For intel its
likely just listing everything but atom

~~~
TsiCClawOfLight
but I have an Athlon II 640 which supports SSE -SSE4A?

They also said that CPU overhead would be low.

~~~
trtg
I can say that even with this latest release, CPU usage on my fairly beefy i7
system is ~ 40% on one core.

------
rjdagost
Does anyone have any real-world experience using the Leap? It looks cool as
hell but I'm hearing rumors that it doesn't work well in the presence of
halogen / incandescent bulbs or direct sunlight. If I have to carefully
control the lighting to be able to use it, that's a dealbreaker for me.

~~~
etrautmann
Yes, I have a dev kit and have played around with a it a bunch. I'm very
impressed with the low latency and high framerate (~110 fps via usb 2, rumored
to go higher for usb 3.0). Latency is unquantified but barely perceptible even
when moving quite quickly.

The potential performance issue is with dropouts and interference. It's pretty
easy to have detected fingers drop in and out, mostly due to fingers occluding
each other. With a level of dynamics modeling/filtering built on top of the
leap SDK, it may be possible to minimize the impact of dropouts.

overall, it does seem like a reasonable way to interact with a computer,
especially for drawing or manipulating objects, etc.

I unfortunately can't post a video because we're building the leap into a
trial clinical device at the moment and its out of my hands.

~~~
narcissus
Clinical devices are an awesome idea for this... nice one! Having worked on
systems in hospitals before, I couldn't believe the number of times users had
to handrub etc. each time they went from handling our scanners back to the
actual product they were working with.

Congratulations on an awesome way to remove that step.

------
yarrel
I'm going to ignore this until the protocol is reverse engineered and a Free
Software driver is released.

~~~
trtg
Well, I guess if you're that much of a diehard, just check out this project
instead: <http://www.duo3d.com/> they're planning on fully opensourcing
everything. If you're annoyed because of the apparent dependency on ubuntu,
note that I got things working on gentoo without much issue:
[http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-
li...](http://www.keyboardmods.com/2013/03/leap-motion-in-gentoo-linux.html)

------
bbwharris
Played with one at sxsw. Ordered it right there. It is as impressive as it
looks.

------
kanja
FINALLY YES

