You may have already stumbled upon the Leap Motion controller, a tiny USB 2.0 device intended to allow you to control your PC with hand motions, somewhat similar to the Kinect. Installing the software and placing the Leap Motion in front of your computer allows you to control a variety of apps and games using only hand motions. Unfortunately the app selections is rather limited and controlling your OS is not possible, at least not yet. It is less than $100 and does offer the potential for some fun so check out Legit Reviews to see if you might like to give it a try.
"The Leap Motion Controller brings affordable gesture control to the PC and gives developers a tool to bring new innovations to the PC industry. In our limited time with the Leap Motion Controller we quickly found out that it is very app limited due to there being less than 60 apps available at the time of launch. Leap Motion gave thousands of these devices to app developers and hoped they would develop some killer software…"
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- MSI CK Series Mechanical Keyboard Review @ Techgage
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The way they talk about apps
The way they talk about apps makes it sound like they want people to make things exclusively for this, rather than augmenting it along with everything we already have. That’s like expecting IR head trackers to replace your keyboard and mouse.
This was the flaw of the Kinect as well. Instead of augmenting the already existing gameplay experience, developers felt the need to create games exclusively for Kinect. And then they ruined Steel Battalion.
Rather than play games exclusively with hand controls, I’d rather have generic hand motions to be bound to complex actions to augment my keyboard, mouse, joystick, arcade stick, gamepad and IR head tracker. I could free up like 15 keys on my keyboard if I replaced flying vehicles startup sequence with a few hand gestures similar to that of starting up a real aircraft.
I’ve seen people playing with
I’ve seen people playing with this all week and it strikes me as incredibly pointless. Too much hassle, too little support, and not really any benefit over just using a mouse instead of waving your hand around in the air to select icons or move windows (yeah, try doing that for eight hours and tell me how your arm feels!).
It seems like a cute gimmick and little more.
Now, if they build it into a laptop and stick it right up there where the camera would be (or lower down, where the hinge would be) and I can use it when I want to just on-the-fly, then that might be a reasonable little addition to a laptop, I guess.