July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Leap Motion, the hotly-anticipated “Kinect for computers” motion control device, will start shipping to consumers on May 13 and will be available for purchase at Best Buy retail locations on May 19, the company announced this morning.

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.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect, motion control has gained more popularity and better precision in recent years. While the creators of the Leap, David Holz and Michael Buckwald, admired the Kinect’s motion sensing abilities, they knew they could create a much more precise device in a tinier package.

Holz and Buckwald’s goal was to create a device that takes the place of a mouse. Instead of being hunched over in front of a computer using a mouse and keyboard, people could use the Leap to browse through their computer with a finger, Holz told me.

Slightly larger than a USB drive, the Leap is accurate to 1/100 of a millimeter according to the company. This means it is responsive to small finger movements, even if your finger only moves a few millimeters.

The Leap device

The Leap creates a four cubic feet interactive space around it, where it can detect finger, hand, and arm movements. Depending on the program connected to the Leap, you can create drawings, zoom in and out of maps in Google Earth, play touch-based games, or interact with 3-D models with the device and you fingers.

At Leap Motion headquarters, I got a demo of the technology and spent some time playing the mobile game Fruit Ninja with the Leap. The precision and fluid motion of the Leap’s technology was impressive. Playing Fruit Ninja with the Leap was faster than on my smartphone, which suffers from friction between the screen and my fingers.

Leap Motion’s technology is an extension of what we’ve seen from the Kinect and webcam-based motion control systems. Flutter, for example, developed a program that uses your webcam to control music and video playback. The Kinect senses your hand movements when browsing through the Xbox’s interface and people have hacked the device for other motion sensing projects.

The Leap has the benefit of working with computer programs and operating systems, giving it access to a vast number of programs. Anything a mouse can do, the Leap can do, said Holz and Buckwald.

Beyond the novelty of flicking your finger to scroll through a webpage, the Leap can benefit people who are unable to use a mouse because of physical limitations. It’s also useful for presentations, as I saw during the demo — you can make drawings on a presentation or flip through PowerPoint slides with the flick of a hand.

Leap Motion is accepting pre-orders for the Leap starting Monday. It will retail for $69.99 and will begin shipping in winter 2012. Software developer kits are also available so developers can create Leap-based programs.

Leap Motion was founded in 2010 in San Francisco. The company has raised $14.55 million from Highland Capital Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and other angel investors to develop its motion sensing technology.

Magical hands image via Shutterstock

Not content with being flung into space, the Angry Birds behemoth is evolving alongside the popularity of motion control. SoftKinetic, a leading developer of gesture-based platforms for consumer electronics, showed off a tech demo showcasing this experience in full flight.

The Belgian-based company, whose DepthSense DS311 camera brings Kinect-like controls to the PC, claims it has developed software that allows any application to be played with gestures, unchanged from the original experience.

As an example of this, the Angry Birds tech demo arrived on YouTube today:

After extremely successful releases on a number of platforms, Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise is far from slowing down. Gesture control is a logical step for the series, so I’d wager we’ll see an official adaptation before the year is out. How long before we’re forced to throw individually bought plush dolls towards our television screens?

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

The funding comes from Silver Lake Sumeru, a private equity firm. The amount wasn’t disclosed. But it was likely a hefty round since PrimeSense is sitting in a good spot now. Microsoft has scooped up two other rivals, so there aren’t as many chip suppliers doing 3D sensing.

“A year ago, this was like science fiction,” said Inon Beracha, (pictured above), chief executive of PrimeSense. “Seeing the response of the consumer to Kinect is overwhelming. I heard a four-year-old was explaining to his father how to use Kinect. It’s so natural.”

PrimeSense designs chips that can capture the movement of people in a 3D space. It processes those images and feeds them to software that translates them into control inputs for game consoles.

PrimeSense’s chips are used in the 3D camera that is the backbone of the Kinect motion-control system, which saw spectacular sales of 8 million units since its debut on Nov. 4. With Kinect, Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, bellowed at his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show, “You are the controller.” That means you use your body to control the game. It took a lot of preparation to line up the supply chain for the Kinect launch, Beracha said.

Tel Aviv, Israel-based PrimeSense is now expanding to customers in the TV and PC markets. Asus showed off its Wavi set-top box, which can wirelessly connect to both a TV and a PC. It takes content stored on the PC and displays it on the TV. The PrimeSense chips allow users to surf through the content using their own hand and body gestures.

Asus plans to launch the Wavi in the second quarter. Other companies are also planning to launch PrimeSense-based systems this year, Beracha said. One of the customers is in the IPTV, or internet protocol TV, market.

PrimeSense calls its technology Natural Interaction Technology. It enables 3D mapping of everything in a room and gesture recognition. It can be used in consumer electronics devices such as TVs, game systems, and PCs. It allows people to get rid of their remote controls and use natural motion instead.

Silver Lake Sumeru is a $1.1 billion middle market tech-focused fund started by Silver Lake Partners, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based private equity firm with $14 billion in assets. Silver Lake’s investments include Skype and Avago. Paul Mercadante, managing director of Silver Lake Sumeru, said that the 3D gesture-recognition technology could revolutionize the way consumers interact with living room devices. Mercadante is joining PrimeSense’s board.

The technology isn’t perfect yet. PrimeSense is working on improving the field of view so that devices such as the Kinect can recognize movement in a wider 3D space. The company is also trying to improve the accuracy, or resolution, of the recognition.

Previous to today’s funding, PrimeSense had raised $29.4 million from investors including Gemini Israel Funds, Genesis Partners and Canaan Partners. Rivals include Optrima, a sister company to Softkinetic. Others rumored to be working on technology include Samsung, PMETec, and Mesa Imaging. Check out the video of Beracha using the Asus Wavi below.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

By moving your eyes one way or another, you can generate controls for a game or other applications.

Chris Culver and Hunter Smith of National Instruments’ Waterloo Labs division showed how they could control a simple game by moving their eyes in one direction or another. The demo was just for fun, but it shows that games might be made even more realistic by giving players one more way to control the action. It represents one more step in the march toward more natural man-machine interfaces for games, in addition to things like Microsoft‘s Kinect motion-control system and the Nintendo Wii.

This is one of the cool concepts I saw today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was tucked away in the Analog Devices meeting room. But now that the researchers have figured out how to do it, somebody else might want to figure out if there’s a point in doing it.

National Instruments showed off a relatively simple hardware design where sensors were wired to Culver’s eyes. They detected which way he was moving his eyes and translated that into controls. As you can see from the video below, they created a Whack-A-Mole game in which Culver used the eye controls to smash the moles down.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Together with Microsoft’s reported half-billion dollar marketing budget for Windows Phone 7, the company will be spending upwards of $1 billion to outdo its competition — which includes rival mobile platforms from Apple and Google, and other motion-control offerings from Nintendo and Sony.

You can always tell how badly Microsoft wants to win given the amount of money it’s willing to spend. The company dumped $500 million in the original Xbox’s marketing campaign in 2000, and while it wasn’t a complete failure with gamers, the console still lost Microsoft over $4 billion. But that initial investment led to the more successful Xbox 360, which consistently outsold the Playstation 3 and was deemed profitable earlier this year.

Kinect is Microsoft’s biggest video game hardware announcement since the Xbox 360′s launch in 2005. It will retail for $149 (or $299 bundled with an Xbox 360 console) starting November 4. The device adds hands-free motion controlling to the Xbox 360 console, and it will compete directly with Sony’s new Move controller and Nintendo’s Wii (which sparked the motion controlling trend).

Expect to see Kinect practically everywhere — including Burger King, Pepsi products, and Kellogg’s cereal boxes. Microsoft, along with its media-buying agency Universal McCann, is targeting moms as well as the typical gamer demographic with Kinect. TV ads for the device will appear on Dancing with the Stars and Glee, while print ads will appear in People, InStyle, and other magazines. The company is also planning a major outdoor event in New York’s Times Square.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---