Hardware
The moment leap motion came out, I was amazed by the prospect of this new way of interacting with computers.
Upon first impressions, I really liked the product. However struggled with some of the poor precision that could be achieved due to the software becoming confused about which fingers it was dealing with at the time.
Steering Wheel
The idea was a very basic steering function from the positioning of the 2 palms. The simplicity meant that you could get rather precise results as the device was very good at detecting palms/fists.
There was 2 approaches I could have taken:
- Integrating the feature into a full steering wheel driver, allowing integration into all games. It would be as simple as installing a controller. The downside to this was the low level programming required for this.
- A more simplistic ‘mouse-yoke’ effect, allowing the device to take control of the mouse position on screen, which in turn affects the control of the vehicle in game.
As the project was just for proof-of-concept, I decided the latter and had very fun results.
The latency was a bit of a problem, especially with fast driving games. However the program was perfect for the more chilled out games like flight simulators. Another problem was the way hands would become incredibly tired hovering in mid air.
Here is a video of the program in action:
I decided to not release this due to the limited use and the lack of integration with proper drivers. (Although I presumer software like this has already been made by now!)