Leap Controllers

Using the Leap motion controller was definitely a new experience for me. It works by using infrared cameras and registering what objects appear in the way, rendering them into game objects. I personally don’t think I’ll be using them in my game but it was a fun experience and I had a few ideas about what they could be used for nonetheless. We were provided with a Unity project containing lots of different scenes that showed off the Leap’s uses and we were told to have a play around, getting use to this new tool.

The first scene simply showed the users hands and responded to you doing different things like clenching your fist, wiggling your fingers and moving them around. This scene is only to show how the Leap controller registers you, so doesn’t have much to do in it.

Simple hands scene

The next scene allowed me to interact with an object, in this case a flower. The flower grows in the centre of the screen allowing you to pick it and hold it. From there you can move it around to look at it and even pull off petals one at a time. This could be a little fiddly at times and the Leap can be a little temperamental, especially if something is covered from below so the Leap can’t see it entirely. However this was a nice little scene to show some basic interaction.

Scene showing how delicate the Leap can be

My favourite scene was where you had 6 little cubes that you could gently pick up and stack upon one another. Again the Leap could have slight problems of freaking out making it very difficult to stack all of the cubes, but as long as your hand wasn’t too near the tower you would be alright. This example of the ability to move objects around and place them down could be very useful in a two player platform game of some form. 

Tower stacking scene

The final scene was very enjoyable and contained a room full of boxes which the user can scoop up and throw about at will. This is more of an example of mass movement/control over a situation using the Leap. It was quite fun and relaxing to spend a minute or two throwing boxes around and watching them bounce off the walls for a while.

Messy block scene