
LeapMotion to be acquired for $30m by UltraHaptics - bhouston
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645604/leap-motion-vr-hand-tracking-ultrahaptics-acquisition-rumor
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bhouston
Raised $100m thus all investors are underwater and founders/employees got
wiped out.

I guess some investors got liquity preferences so maybe a few are at least
whole.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/leap-
motion](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/leap-motion)

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villgax
They were launched right when ML was going mainstream & ability to infer the
proprietary algos became widespread by simply learning hand state from their
own data points & raw input images from commodity RGB cameras.

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karmakaze
This is a bit sad but inevitable. They were trying to cover so much ground and
execute to perfection. Whatever lead they had shrank with time and advances on
fronts outside the hw and core dev may not see the light of day.

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toomuchtodo
I purchased one of the first LeapMotion devices, and I was not terribly
impressed with the performance and returned it. Not sure whether the IP has
much value with Google's Soli [1] project seeming to be further ahead.

[1] [https://atap.google.com/soli/](https://atap.google.com/soli/)

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kohanz
For what it's worth, the performance improved quite a bit with subsequent
firmware updates. It was quite a remarkable device that impressed anyone I let
try it, but finding a mass-market use-case proved impossible. They tried to
pivot to VR, but it was very late. I think going after the consumer market
(with an app store to be filled with games) was a mistake. Easy to say in
hindsight, of course.

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ScottFree
> the performance improved quite a bit with subsequent firmware updates.

But it didn't improve enough to be useful for anything practical. The most
useful thing I could make it do reliably was detect swiping your hand left and
right. I was really hoping I could use it as a mouse replacement on laptops,
but accurately tracking individual finger placement never materialized.

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rasz
Their whole value proposition was clever software to compute on stream from
stereo cameras. Jumping from VR (small market) to automotive and piggybacking
on self driving seemed as such an obvious move.

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tootie
I'm surprised Ultrahaptics had $30M to spend. Their product is super niche.

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joshu
how do you know it is $30m in cash?

