Which is precisely why Leap Motion released this video showcasing its impressive Windows 7 and Windows 8 integration:

With Leap Motion, you can now do everything available in Windows for multitouch functionality — without actually touching anything. The company promises that operating system-level functionality and web browsing capabilities will work out of the box, no software or driver installations required, and will be simple to use.

“We want our users to have a magical experience, with easy and natural movements in the air leading to amazing interactions,” co-founder David Holz said in a statement. “Leap Motion’s mission is to break down the barriers between people and technology.”

The demo shows a user navigating Windows 8′s home screen tiles via in-air gestures, selecting and rearranging tiles, opening a web browser, and surfing sites while zooming sections for a closer look, all without touching a mouse or a touch-sensitive screen. In addition, previewing one of Leap Motion’s intended uses as a controller in the media room or kitchen, the demo shows how simple it is to scroll through Netflix, select a movie, and begin watching. Or to draw a scene in one of the Leap Motion apps, then rotate it in 3D.

The Leap Motion device is tiny, about the size of a pack of gum. It senses both of your hands and all 10 of your fingers with 200 times the sensitivity of the Xbox 360 Kinect. The company recently announced OEM bundling with select computers from ASUS, and an even more interesting deal with HP that will see the hardware melt away into the computer itself, embedding Leap Motion’s functionality into laptops to make them gesture-enabled right out of the box, without any hardware components to plug in.

And there’s more to come:

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches, and smartphones, and glasses, and everything,” Leap Motion’s COO Andy Miller told me a couple of weeks ago.

All I want to know is: Where’s the Mac OS X demo?

Image credits: Leap Motion

It’s a fundamentally new experience, Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald said in a statement:

“Google Earth combined with Leap Motion’s 3-D, touch-free technology feels so incredibly immersive – people feel connected to the world in a new and compelling way.”

One billion people have downloaded the desktop version of Google Earth, which is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. That’s a staggering number of people exploring the planet in a way almost unimaginable decades ago, and that probably makes it one of the most popular pieces of software of all time. Initially, of course, only 10,000 people — developers in Leap Motion’s developer program — will be able to experience the new control technology.

But with huge pre-orders for the innovation product and already-announced bundling deals with Asus as well as full build-the-technology-right-in integration deals with companies like HP, many more will be able to enjoy flying around the planet.

Next up, Android?

This is a major win for Leap Motion, which has been innovating and consummating deals almost at light speed in the past few months. Not only is Google Earth extremely popular, this is a deal with one of the most powerful companies on the planet, Google. And it’s a first test of gesture control for a Google product that could lead to much, much more.

Last week Leap Motion COO Andy Miller told me that mobile devices will benefit from the company’s 3-D motion control technology too:

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches and smartphones and glasses, and everything,” he said.

With one Google deal in the works, plus a complete hardware integration with HP in the books in which the controller widget disappears into the actual body of the laptop or desktop, Leap’s plans are getting closer and closer to reality.

CEO Buckwald added, “Our mission at Leap Motion is to provide a fundamentally better computing experience that frees people to create and explore the digital world in new ways.

Both free and professional versions of Google Earth will benefit from the Leap Motion integration, Leap Motion told me today.

The pro version of Google Earth adds analysis, measurement, visualization, and data features to the free version for use by construction companies, geologists, and marketers. Google also announced today that two new features have been added in Google Earth Pro: map-making (creating legends, scales, and titles for a map), and Viewshed (the ability to visualize viewpoints, distances, and potential views).

And, in a bonus for Earth Day today, Google Earth Pro is going on sale. Normally $399, it will be 50 percent off at $199 for the next 24 hours.

And mobile devices like smartphones, tablets — and glasses — are coming up next, the company told me.

Currently, Leap Motion requires a tiny peripheral attached to your computer to enable 3-D motion control, but this deal means that HP customers will be able to control their PCs with waves, motions, and gestures in the air without any need for attached peripherals or extra software. Everything will just be built right in.

And that, according to Leap Motion chief operating officer Andy Miller, is just the beginning.

“Any place where you can fit tiny pinhead cameras, you can fit Leap,” Miller told me yesterday. “And this deal, we feel, is just huge for Leap, for our technology, for validation, and for our ability to miniaturize our hardware into tiny devices.”

Source: Leap Motion

The Leap controller – external version

The deal has been a year in the making, Miller said, as HP has long nurtured a relationship with Leap Motion and has been evaluating the startup’s technology for almost that long. Leap Motion and HP are not yet announcing the scope of the deal or which exact PCs HP will be embedding the technology into, but it will be a “very significant” number, probably in the millions.

HP is the leading PC retailer on the planet, selling 35 million PCs in the first quarter of 2013. The terms of the deal with Leap Motion allow HP to both embed the entire solution right into its products and offer an external Leap Motion controller bundled with a PC.

And although PC sales just had a disastrous quarter and HP sales were down 23 percent, this announcement could be just the stimulus HP needs to boost sales — and boost excitement for its products.

PCs, however, are just the beginning. The sky is the limit for Leap Motion, Miller said, as the company is looking to commercialize its incredibly detailed motion capture and control technology in industries as diverse as robotic surgery and automotive manufacturing. And in every mobile device you carry.

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches, and smartphones, and glasses, and everything,” Miller said yesterday.

Which means the Android phone, and perhaps the iPhone you carry, could have motion recognition technology soon, as could your tablet. And the glasses part sounds very much like a Google Glass application, which would be an extremely interesting possibility. Leap Motion’s tiny sensor is amazingly precise, tracking both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second and detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter. All of which could make for some very interesting mobile applications.

That, however, is for the future.

Today, the news is HP and bundling into PCs. This is Leap Motion’s second major OEM bundling deal — the company announced a bundling agreement with Taiwan-based Asus in January. That deal, however, was just bundling; there was no embedding of the actual technology into laptops or desktops.

Miller mentioned that Leap Motion’s app store, Airspace, will also come pre-loaded on HP computers that come with the company’s technology.

Image credit: Minority Report

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I’m going way out on a limb here, and cutting it off behind me.

But I have a theory. The more Samsung “adds value” to Android by customizing a version of it for the Galaxy line of phones, as it’s doing with its new Galaxy S IV, the more it will suck.

This is, of course, the company that sold 400 million freaking phones last year. And 57 million smartphones in just one quarter of 2012. Samsung seems, more than any other, to be the company that has shaved a few hundred billion off Apple’s share price.

But companies, like people, do best when they stick to what they’re good at. Better yet, what they’re great at.

And let me tell you, there’s no way that Samsung is great at machine language translation. And facial/eye recognition to drive smart document scrolling. And building app stores for hundreds of millions of global users. And tying Kinect-style hand gestures to phone functionality navigation. And building a personal health/self quantification system. And programming a voice-controlled smart personal assistant. And implementing a ticket-and-card aggregating Apple Passbook clone. And any of a thousand other software-based features Samsung is adding to its phones and laying at the pagan feet of the ruthless god called product differentiation.

No bloody way.

Not as good as Google, for the features that Google chooses to build, and are amenable to machine learning and improvement. Not as good as Fitbit or Up or other companies whose livelihood is self-quantification and health. Not as good as Kinect, or Leap Motion, which are focused on gesture control.

“Some of the features definitely didn’t seem to work all that well,” analyst Avi Greengart, who Samsung pre-briefed about its phone, told me today. “For the hover feature … you have pick the exact right distance from the screen for it to activate, and you select things you weren’t intending to select.”

Other features worked better, like a camera app that puts you in the picture while you take the picture, Greengart said, though he was most concerned about the sheer quantity of new features overwhelming consumers.

“A lot of it will drive people crazy,” he said. “But at the same time people will buy the phone so they can check it out.”

There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is that Samsung is not a software company, in much the same way that Intel, though it employs thousands of software engineers, is not a software company. Another is that ancillary features added by a company that is primarily focused on using those features to sell more of that product are seldom as good as the features created by companies that focus on those things exclusively.

But the big one is that Google is getting frightfully good at software. Partly because it learns a million times a minute as customers interact with its solutions, and data drives its decisions, but also partly because it gets mobile in a way that few other companies do. Google currently has five of the top six apps in North America on any platform.

Do you really think Samsung can build a better mobile user experience than Google?

I haven’t yet handled, played with, or slept beside a Galaxy S IV. But the early reviews on that cool eye-tracking technology that auto-scrolls documents for you? It works “better in theory than they did in practice,” according to CNet. And that neat gesture phone control technology? It seems to “work intermittently.”

ZDnet wonders if this is innovation or gimmicks, and Gizmodo hits the nail on the smartphone head:

Truthfully, there are too many modifications to go into, and most of them aren’t things you’ll ever use. Which is really the S IV’s biggest problem.

In other words, Samsung’s over-the-top Broadway launch for the Galaxy S IV might be the perfect metaphor for a phone that has everything you don’t need: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.

Now, we’re talking about unreleased hardware and software, and there are bound to be improvements before Samsung ships the Galaxy S IV to customers. But putting together a coherent, excellent operating system with well-integrated features is hard. Google went through multiple iterations before finally starting to get it really right perhaps a couple of years ago. Microsoft went through hell for years, trying to find its way in mobile operating systems.

Is it likely that Samsung, which is building on the Android foundation but chipping away at every piece of Google’s fingerprints it can while doing so, can get it right?

I think not.

“Look at the Samsung Galaxy S III,” ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen told me. “Everything that was good about the software came from Google, and everything that was annoying came from Samsung.”

Others that I’ve talked to agree, but still see a role for Samsung’s innovation.

“I agree that some of the software is buggy,” Rocky Agrawal, an analyst and mobile consultant who also writes for VentureBeat, told me. “If they would stick to the non-core things that they’re adding it could make sense … but to go in and mess up core stuff like keyboards and error correction, that’s just innovation for the sake of innovation. You should differentiate on things that matter.”

We have seen this movie before, during the 90s and 2000s, in a different industry: the PC market. Much as Android is to iOS what Windows was to Macintosh, Android vendors are to each other what HP was to Dell was to Compaq was to every other faceless PC manufacturer: a clone trying to be an individual.

And with every vendor trying to deliver unique value, a unique product, and a unique brand in a by-nature commoditized market, they get desperate. The result: software that adds a line item in the product comparison chart and a bullet point in the marketing blurb, but is really just crapware.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been that crapware vendor, sad to say, bundling a solution into HP’s, Asus’s, and even Intel’s offerings.

And my money’s on something similar happening here.

(Oh, and these user interface issues will be at the heart of our discussion at the Mobile Summit in Sausalito on April 1 and 2, where we’ve invited the mobile industry’s leading players. We’re hosting a wide cross-section of ecosystem from Google, Samsung, Facebook across the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, to Cisco, Intel and the major analytics folks, like Flurry — along with the top 60 or so publishers and disruptive private companies.)

photo credit: Great Beyond via photopin cc

Or maybe even your keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft Research is always working on cool new features, and based on a video Microsoft just released, it seems clear that the next version of Kinect will be able to better recognize hands, hand positioning, and hand gestures, effectively letting you control your Xbox — and your PC — with just the equipment god gave you, right out of the box.

Here’s the demo video:

The company has a long ways to go, however, to catch up to Leap Motion.

Leap Motion is essentially a $80 Kinect for your computer, which is 200 times more sensitive than the current Xbox 360′s motion-sensing camera. You can use it to control virtually anything you might want to on your computers, and Leap Motion’s tiny sensor is amazingly precise. It tracks both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second, detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter.

We have no idea that the prototype Xbox controller is that precise: The video does not show individual finger control, and the screen shows 30 frames per second. (Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have greater capability — Microsoft is certainly keeping some secrets.) But the Xbox is designed as a living room system, so it will likely have a much wider field of sensitivity and a much greater capability to recognize multiple people and multiple hands.

And note that the video says this is Kinect for Windows. Right now, that’s aimed at commercial markets such as in-store demoing solutions. But that’s just a tiny little sideways shuffle from being available for the PC in your kitchen, which you could then control from anywhere, no matter if your hands are full, or clean.

Really, the video hints at the future: Controllers for everything, in the air, hardware-free.

That’s amazing, and it’s no longer science fiction or a Tom Cruise movie.

Hat tip: Engadget

If you haven’t already pre-ordered, however, the price is now a little higher: $79.99, up $10 from the pre-order cost.

In addition, the Leap Motion app store now has a name, and still no release date but at least a general timeline. COO Andy Miller told me yesterday that the company’s app store will be known as Airspace, and that it will be opening in the very near future. Fifty-two thousand developers have applied for Leap Motion developer kits, and 12,000 have already been sent out.

“We’ll be opening our app store for submissions very soon,” Miller said. “People are submitting apps already, even before it’s open.”

Those apps include Disney’s Sugar Rush, a racing game from the Wreck-it Ralph movie, a paint-in-the-air app from Corel, and a “devil-stick two-hand music beat app” from well-regarded game studio Double Fine called Dischord, which will enable users to make music in space.

“There’s a whole new world of interesting apps out there letting you do things you couldn’t ever do before,” Miller said, adding that innovation beyond what is possible with a mouse and keyboard is part of Leap Motion’s criteria for allowing apps into Airspace. “I don’t think Airspace will be hundreds of thousands of apps, ever. It’s curated, and if an app doesn’t meet our standards, it won’t go in.”

One more app that announced its upcoming availability is Clear, the Mac to-do list. Here’s a quick video from RealMac, the company behind the software, showing what it can do:

Leap Motion says its hardware and software is up to 200 times more sensitive than existing motion-control technology and can track the movement of all 10 of your fingers in increments as small as 1/100th of a millimeter at up to 290 frames per second.

The partnership with ASUS will see the Leap, a device about the size of a pack of gum, bundled with select ASUS computers shipping this year. The Leap functions much as a Nintendo Wii or Xbox Kinect but is much more precise and sensitive, tracking movements of both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second and detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter.

I talked to Leap Motion’s president and chief operating officer, Andy Miller, about the announcements.

“We’re starting with all-in-ones and then moving to high-end laptops,” Miller said. “An all-in-one is just a great demonstration of our technology.”

Bundling the Leap with ASUS is just the beginning, Miller told me. The Leap adds physical gestures to the now-standard computer interface vocabulary of visuals, mice, keyboards, and touch, and “lots of other OEMs” are interested in the technology.

“Companies are interested in using Leap in laptops, tablets, robotic surgery … we’ve been contacted by thousands of places from fast-food places to fighter jet manufacturers to integrate this technology,” Miller said.

40,000 developers have expressed interest in building software that takes advantage of Leap’s gesture technology, and Leap Motion has already sent out 12,000 units to help developers build and test their code. Apps that are being built for Leap include games, productivity apps, music and art apps, and more, Miller said.

Leap Motion is also building an app store so that developers can monetize their Leap-compatible apps. The app store will be available for both Windows 8 and Mac OS X.

I asked Miller if Asus will be building any Leap-specific apps, as the computer manufacturer has already built a significant amount of software for its netbooks, laptops, and desktops in an attempt to differentiate itself from competitors. Miller confirmed that “it’s on the table,” and that the Leap is now “getting into their roadmap,” which would enable ASUS to build software that integrates gestures into a native, built-in way to interact with the company’s PCs.

Leap’s gesture-based technology seems a natural for gaming, and Miller said Leap Motion is also talking to gaming console manufacturers about incorporating better-quality gesture support into their platforms, but that “it’s not our priority right now.”

The Leap is now available for preorder at $69.99; the retail version, when available, will cost slightly more. ASUS has not yet set pricing for its Leap-equipped PCs, however.

The new $30 million funding round will help Leap Motion bring the technology to other OEMs and to retail channels later this year.

“Leap Motion is poised to fundamentally change human/computer interaction, and this new funding will help us bring our technology to the mass global market,” Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald said in a statement. “With this influx of capital, coupled with the major OEM partnership we also announced today, we’re ready to make 2013 the year of the new interface.”

Here’s a Leap in action:

The only thing needed now? Software that understands gestures.

Which is precisely why over the next two weeks, Leap Motion will send 10,000 Leap units to new developers to help them build software applications and games which take advantage of the new gesture-based input capabilities … and why the company has attracted over 40,000 developers so far.

San Francisco-based Leap Motion has already put the Leap device into limited mass production.

It’s about the size of a pack of gum, or small iPod. Sitting right in front of your Mac or PC, the device senses your hand motions and allows you to control your computer with hand gestures in the air. Those motions will allow you to zoom in on pictures, rotate on-screen 3-D objects, draw, write, create 3-D computer-aided designs, and much more.

The device costs about $70 at pre-order prices, and will be delivered to consumers in early 2013. But before the hardware is delivered, Leap Motion wants a rich software ecosystem.

So the company is also releasing an updated software development kit (SDK) today, with new features that will help developers build gesture-aware apps much faster than before. The new SDK offers pre-fabricated building blocks: a library of defined interaction APIs. Which means that instead of trying to comprehend how a user’s hand moved, developers will now have access to a library of sensed motions: a twist, a push, a sweep. The Leap software will report a defined and pre-identified motion, and developers will now simply need to map that gesture to actions in their applications.

“Our top priority is making sure that when the Leap Motion controller ships to consumers, it is supported by a wide array of quality apps,” Leap Motion co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald said in a statement.

Leap Motion released a demo app showcasing how an intern software developer used the new SDK to create a simple 3-D game:

Finally, the company announced that Leap will ship with an app store, so users can pick up more software that understands what they are doing with their hands, and so developers can monetize their creations.

There is no word yet, however, on whether major applications such as Microsoft Office, iPhoto, or even web browsers such as Chrome will incorporate support for Leap gestures. Or whether operating system vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google (yes, Chrome OS) will built support for Leap right into the system.

Leap Motion has raised $14.55 million from various investors to take the Leap and its gesture language to the world.

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