Leap Motion and the Disappearing Interface

#leapmotion

David Holz and Michael Buckwald, uber-geniuses and co-founders of
Leap Motion, took the massive SXSW auditorium crowd through their journey in creating their breakthrough motion gesture based controller. Think of the Microsoft Kinect, but for your computer.

Holz started the QA with WSJ’s Jessica Lessin by stating: What’s holding back computing is the limited ways in which we use them.

Holz then demoed the Leap Motion controller for the crowd by molding a piece of clay into a a weird head, all through a couple swishes of his hands. With only centimeters of movement, his fingers controlled the entire screen.

So how is Leap Motion continuing to blossom?
It’s the users that keep the innovation coming, which bring in more users and so forth. Right now there are over 12,000 developers working on Leap Motion, out of over 50,000 applications received,

Where can Leap Motion technology be used beyond the PC?
Tablets, phones are obvious next steps. But imagine the applications for Industrial services, remote surgeons, clean rooms, etc. They also plan to make it compatible for future devices which don’t exist yet.

How can Leap Motion compete with Apple, Microsoft, Google and the other big guys who are rolling out competing technology?
By focusing on buildinging the developer community and earning their loyalty.
Motion sensing is useless without the content that goes with it, and you need an ecosystem of great developers to create it.

Where is wearable technology going and how does Leap Motion get involved?
By making the sensors smaller and cheaper. Today they are doing the best that can be done, but there’s an exponential increase of the world catching up with technology, and that will enable them to make next leap (PUN ALERT).
Leap Motion has plans to get small enough to go anywhere.
Buckwald asks, “Why should someone have to press buttons on their body? Why can’t they just make natural gestures/movements?”

Regarding bringing intuition to computing:
WYSIWYG - no menus to worry about.
Forget menus and buttons, let’s use natural human movements.
People value creation and inspiration more than consumption, and LM is enabling them to do more.
Kids will be able to understand quantum physics and the movements of subatomic particles because now they can play with them and feel how they move.

You can pre-order your Leap Motion foday for $79.99.