Leap Motion, a hand-tracking hardware company, posts about its VR work, Project North Star AR headset, and APIs.
HN links it for company announcements such as the Ultrahaptics merger and VR plans, and for its job postings.
I both agree and disagree.
A metaverse doesn't need to include games per se, though portals to standalone games will be important - the metaverse simply acts as a lobby.
However, the critical component is the unified physics and interaction model. Games in the real world emerge because people can rely on consistent actions around which rules can be based.
Let people throw and catch, and people will play basketball with trash cans. Provide good collision models and people will play baseball or hide-and-seek. Basic occlusion and grabbing mechanics enable card games. Yes, provide great hit boxes and collision detection and people will become swordsmen.
Right now, creating great (predictable and realistic) physics in VR is CPU expensive and with lots of finicky edge cases. Leap Motion and others have done good work here[1], but anyone that has spent time in VR knows the challenges of simply stacking boxes without everything randomly flying away when the corner of one box is accidentally placed "inside" another box.
A successful metaverse requires physics to be predictable, consistent, and fun. Games will emerge. But expecting a single universe to somehow also extend to the requirements of games like Fortnite, Minecraft, or GTA5 - each of which have their own physics, graphics, and gameplay optimizations - is a difficult, if not impossible, goal.
[1] http://blog.leapmotion.com/designing-physical-interactions-for-objects-that-dont-exist/
Leap Motion | San Francisco | Full-Time | ONSITE or REMOTE
Leap Motion is seeking junior and senior engineers with experience in areas such as hardware, systems engineering, software engineering, machine learning, computer vision, cloud infrustructure, data engineering and graphics / game development.
Interested? Feel free to reach out directly at dholz at leapmotion.com
Background & More Information:
Leap is a world leader in natural user interfaces for Virtual and Augmented Reality.
We're known best for our cutting edge markerless hand tracking technology:
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ_53T2jBGg
And also most recently an open source Augmented Reality platform called North Star:
Announcement post: http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/
Technical deep dive: http://blog.leapmotion.com/our-journey-to-the-north-star/
Hi,
Kate from Leap Motion here. Thanks for your interest! Wanted to flag a couple of our recent developments to you.
Most recently, we've been working on a series of developments specifically for VR, opening up our raw image API and beginning to optimize top-down tracking so that devs can begin experimenting with Leap Motion as a VR input tool in a bigger way:
Get the full scoop here: http://blog.leapmotion.com/leap-motion-sets-a-course-for-vr/
Also, our v2 software is available for download on our Developer Portal: https://developer.leapmotion.com/. If you have a device, I'd encourage you to give a spin. Would love to hear your thoughts.
Personally I see more in Augmented Reality than Virtual Reality, certainly regarding applications.
It's also not that commercial interesting that a big percentage of people gets sick of VR. We stopped demoing because of this. AR seems to have less of those problems from empirical experience. I can use a Hololens for hours without feeling anything while with an oculus rift I get queasy after a couple of minutes.
The only thing that I'm still waiting for is project northstar (http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/) so the devices becomes cheaper. The high price seems to hamper the adoption a lot.
One of the major problems with this is that whatever you're hooking the Leap Motion up to will need to be pretty beefy, since the way the LM works is by offloading the processing needed by the sensors [0]. The Leap Motion is in such a small form factor precisely because it doesn't actually do very much on the inside. All of the processing is done on the connected host. I have no idea what the minimum requirements for that processing is, but I don't think a RPi or Edison is going to cut it.
[0]: http://blog.leapmotion.com/understanding-latency-part-1/
The Leap Motion uses infrared light. It was hugely disappointing at first. Supposedly it got much better after the Orion SDK release.
http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/
Here are a few other ideas gesture devices like the Mylo, FingerIO, and Intel Real Sense:
https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org#gesture-computing