I played around with an early devkit of the Leap Motion when it first came out. At the time, there were quite a few issues with the technology.
- The company was being overly secretive about the tech behind the hardware, and as a result was exposing very little useful stuff in the API.
- There is something inherently dissatisfying about waving your hands in thin air to control something. The lack of any haptic feedback and no way to ascertain the vision frustum of the device made it very uncomfortable to use.
- Like a lot of startups, Leap Motion wanted to become a platform instead of being a hardware company. This made using it a total pain, having to go through their app store to accomplish even basic tasks. This also leads to a rather disingenuous customer-company relationship, as the company is not interested in just selling you their hardware, but also wants to control the way you use the hardware.
The entire thing would be far more appealing and hackable if they opened up their API and allowed the developer to access the raw data - depthmaps, point clouds, motion vectors - whatever's available internally. Sadly, this does not seem to be happening.
Four years is a long time. Our API is quite open, and we provided public access to the raw image data back in early 2014. As for our App Store and App Home, sure, we built out a curated app ecosystem. Developers have always been free to publish on other platforms with no licensing fees, and we've actually built out a Developer Gallery (shortly to be just "Gallery") where downloading just the executables or jumping to Steam is the norm.
- The company was being overly secretive about the tech behind the hardware, and as a result was exposing very little useful stuff in the API.
- There is something inherently dissatisfying about waving your hands in thin air to control something. The lack of any haptic feedback and no way to ascertain the vision frustum of the device made it very uncomfortable to use.
- Like a lot of startups, Leap Motion wanted to become a platform instead of being a hardware company. This made using it a total pain, having to go through their app store to accomplish even basic tasks. This also leads to a rather disingenuous customer-company relationship, as the company is not interested in just selling you their hardware, but also wants to control the way you use the hardware.
The entire thing would be far more appealing and hackable if they opened up their API and allowed the developer to access the raw data - depthmaps, point clouds, motion vectors - whatever's available internally. Sadly, this does not seem to be happening.