Leap Motion

The Leap Motion controller is a small USB peripheral device which is designed to be placed on a physical desktop, facing upward. Using two monochromatic IR cameras and three infrared LEDs, the device observes a roughly hemispherical area, to a distance of about 1 meter. The LEDs generate pattern-less IR light[32] and the cameras generate almost 300 frames per second of reflected data, which is then sent through a USB cable to the host computer, where it is analyzed by the Leap Motion controller software using "complex maths" in a way that has not been disclosed by the company, in some way synthesizing 3D position data by comparing the 2D frames generated by the two cameras





From the earliest hardware prototypes to the latest tracking software, the Leap Motion platform has come a long way. We’ve gotten lots of questions about how our technology works, so today we’re taking a look at how raw sensor data is translated into useful information that developers can use in their applications.



From a hardware perspective, the Leap Motion Controller is actually quite simple. The heart of the device consists of two cameras and three infrared LEDs. These track infrared light with a wavelength of 850 nanometers, which is outside the visible light spectrum

The Leap Motion Service is the software on your computer that processes the images. After compensating for background objects (such as heads) and ambient environmental lighting, the images are analyzed to reconstruct a 3D representation of what the device sees. Next, the tracking layer matches the data to extract tracking information such as fingers and tools. Our tracking algorithms interpret the 3D data and infer the positions of occluded objects. Filtering techniques are applied to ensure smooth temporal coherence of the data. The Leap Motion Service then feeds the results – expressed as a series of frames, or snapshots, containing all of the tracking data – into a transport protocol.