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leapmotion/YouTube
hands on

This motion tracker will allow you to use your hands in virtual reality

Leap Motion is working on an attachment for Oculus Rift which allows you to interact with a VR experience using your hands.

VIRTUAL REALITY HEADSETS like Oculus Rift are offering some exciting experiences (despite not being officially released), but how you interact with them is limited.

You’re either placed on an on-rails experience or have to control with a joypad or mouse, which isn’t bad, but does somewhat ruin the feeling that you’re in a different world.

That’s what Leap Motion is banking on as it come up with a way for you to interact with VR experiences using your hands.

For those unfamiliar with the company, its original product effectively replaces your mouse with a motion tracker, using gestures to control your computer (Think of a smaller version of Microsoft’s Kinect and you’re on the right track).

While it hasn’t exactly replaced the mouse, it’s repurposing the technology for VR devices.

Leap VR is basically a motion tracker which can be attached to a VR headset, but it does give an idea into such technology could be used to create simple experiences.

Leap Motion GIF leapmotion / YouTube leapmotion / YouTube / YouTube

Of course, whether it’s a success or not depends on whether developers back it and create experiences around it.

It’s very basic, but with projects like Google’s Project Tango in the works, we could be seeing more examples like this appearing sooner rather than later.

leapmotion / YouTube

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