This Fall Motion Control LEAPs into the Future

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Can we get a wow?

San Francisco start-up Leap Motion made the announcement that they were taking a limited set of pre-orders for their thumb-drive sized motion control device The Leap late last night and by the morning it was all over the Internet gadget blogs.

While the GEE-WHIZ! Factor is high, the first thing i thought of was all the OTHER mass market motion control devices we’ve seen come and go over the years:

• U-Force
• Power Glove
• Wii
• Kinect

This one looks like it might just be the closest to the Minority Report effect tech-heads have been chasing after since that film came out, but as a practical matter how many people will actually take to this kind of input? Heck, I’m still not entirely enamored of the touch pad… and what I’m really looking for is a droid who understands the language of moisture evaporator… uh… I mean what I’m personally looking for is motion control that doesn’t leave me shackled to the desk chair.

While I definitely want to get my hands on off near this device and feel out the possibilities, there is no way to pass judgement on whether is is the next big thing. If it is, I expect it to be mostly limited to use in laptop situations– it’s easy to imagine this technology being incorporated into laptop designs running in parallel with touch pads.

h/t to Endgadget