Microsoft’s Kinect $109.99 at Kmart continues to be the standard

Microsoft’s Kinect $109.99 at Kmart continues to be the standard for motion control that doesn’t require you hold a device, but back in May a serious competitor appeared. Leap Motion started showing off the Leap motion controller, which promised accuracy of 0.01mm. That means it’s more accurate than a mouse, and allows the movement of individual fingers to be detected. A low price point of just $69.99 also removes a major barrier to entry.

Now Leap Motion is shipping out dev kits for the USB-connected controller, and LabView hacker has just received theirs. The LabView team is already known for their interesting projects involving Wii Remotes, Kinect, Arduino, and Android phones, so we expected something a bit different from them using Leap, and they have delivered.

Just 24 hours after receiving the Leap dev kit they had it wirelessly hooked up to and controlling the movement of a quadcopter. By tilting and moving a hand over the Leap, the quadcopter adjusted itself to match, and the feedback was almost instant as well as being quite accurate.

The team said it was a simple task to get the quadcopter reacting by wrapping C# code into LabView and using the SDK to detect and communicate movement input. If they can do that in just a day, it bodes well for how quickly other developers are going to get to grips with the motion controller and start producing some interesting projects.