Today, Leap Motion announced they were releasing a new attachment that will allow developers to fix their motion-tracking devices to the front of an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Leap will also be updating their software accordingly to be better suited to track gestures facing forward or down, whereas currently tracking capabilities are limited to be from a table looking up.
At the outset, this may not seem like a very big deal. We tried the Leap Motion out ourselves earlier this year – even including it as part of our booth at Dx3 in Toronto – but neither our staff nor the attendees were convinced that it represented the future of computing. Some gaming capabilities, maybe, but even that was a stretch.
So why is it such a big deal that Leap is now going to be more easily paired with Oculus, which is by itself a groundbreaking piece of technology?
Because it's going to allow for a new level of augmented reality that has not been possible before.
Check out the below video to get an idea of what will be possible when pairing an Oculus headset with the Leap Motion:
Prior to this announcement by Leap, when wearing the Oculus headset you can be immersed in a virtual experience through your eyes, but you would also have to use some sort of game controller to take actions; you can't incorporate things like your hands and body movements into the experience you're seeing. By incorporating the infrared data that Leap can provide, what you experience through Oculus can be affected by what you are doing outside of it.
In the demo video above, when you stick your hand into a sea of bubbles, the bubbles move appropriately. If you're in a flying experience, moving your hands in a particular direction like Superman actually changes your direction.
Down the road, Leap even expects it could pull in greater detail about your surroundings to incorporate into the virtual reality experience, allowing for full-blown augmented reality. Leap says:
With next-generation “mega-sensors” like this, a Leap Motion device can literally become your eyes into the digital and physical realms – allowing you to seamlessly mix and mash, fade and blend, between virtual environments and the sharpness of the real world.
Check out some examples of what this could lead to in the future:
The possibilities for new digital experiences seem endless.
