[munchbunny]

I was one of the pre-orderers for the original Leap Motion. I played around with making apps for it within the first few weeks.

It was pretty bad. I was fighting the API the whole time because its post-processed palm and finger positioning data was noisy and and error-prone, and it didn't have a raw mode. The API would frequently lose track of individual fingers. You also couldn't do any hand gestures that involved your palm pointing horizontally instead of up/down because it would lose track of your occluded fingers. It also had issues tracking fingers when you held them together (as if you were going to karate-chop something). It's just too many quirks to deal with if you're trying to do hand position and gesture input.

Maybe it's improved since then, but after one day back around the initial launch I basically gave up on the tech for hand tracking, deciding that it was just not a good approach.

[throwaway98237]

I bought 5 I was so excited. I ended up selling 4 after realizing that they were gonna require more time than I'd expected. I need to go back and see if they've since improved their platform.

[leapmotion_alex]

Head writer at Leap Motion here, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But it's like night and day.

[munchbunny]

What has changed?

It's clearly a much more mature company now, so I'm genuinely curious even if I had reasons to give up on the original device.

[leapmotion_alex]

The software has gone through two successive generations, each a massive step up from the last.

[munchbunny]

I suppose I was hoping for a bit more detail than that - are there any key areas where those improvements happened?

[leapmotion_alex]

Sure! With V2 we saw a more robust and granular hand model, with every finger and joint in the hand being identified. Significantly better performance against ambient light. And huge improvements to how the software handled finger occlusion.

A lot of these improvements were diminished when we went to VR -- new angles, complex backgrounds, different ambient lighting conditions. So we made the Orion software, which was an even bigger step up:

- lower latency

- longer range

- better and faster hand recognition

- vastly improved robustness to cluttered backgrounds and ambient light