Will These Guys Kill The Computer Interface As We Know It? How two grade-school friends created Leap Motion, a company that wants to turn mouse-clicks into waves of the hand. End Of The Interface David Holz [left] and Michael Buckwald have built a device called the Leap Motion controller that allows users to interact with computers with a wave of a hand. Cody Pickens David Holz took the main stage at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, the annual innovation conference in Austin, Texas, looking like a hobbit on casual Friday. He wore an oversize blue polo shirt and billowy khakis with a big wallet bulge in the front pocket and had a wild nest of curly hair that frizzed around a thinning patch in the back. Even at South by Southwest (SXSW), a gathering teeming with bright-eyed inventors with big ideas and little time for haircuts, the 24-year-old founder of the company Leap Motion, which makes a new motion-tracking controller for computers, stood out as a particularly glorious example of the species geek. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was scheduled to speak immediately after Holz, and Al Gore was up right after that, so eager fans were filing into the auditorium during the Leap Motion presentation, as if it were a kind of opening act—some background music as everyone picked their sight lines for the main event. Holz, who shared the stage with his co-founder and best friend, Michael Buckwald, didn’t seem to notice. He spoke with a combination of barely contained enthusiasm and uncanny self-assuredness. The title of the presentation was “The Disappearing User Interface,” and it called for a sweeping reinvention of how we interact with computers. “I should be able to log in to any computer and not have to know some language to use it,” he said. “I should just do what makes sense to me intuitively. It’s on the technology to understand me.” “It’s becoming very clear that the thing holding back devices from doing more isn’t their power or their cost or ubiquity or size,” Buckwald explained. “It’s that the way users interact with them is very simple. And that, unfortunately, leads to things like drop-down menus and keyboard shortcuts . . . elements that require people to learn and train rather than just do and create.” The audience, many of whom were pecking away at laptops and tablets, perked up. And then Holz began his product demo. The Leap Motion controller looked like a miniature iPhone and sat on a table in front of a computer onstage. Within an eight-cubic-foot cone of space above it, the controller can track motions as small as .001 millimeters, making it significantly more sensitive than Microsoft’s Kinect. Holz started waving his hands above the Leap, and tracer lines danced across the computer screen. He wiggled his fingers, barely perceptibly, and zoomed in on the display until the tracers again filled it, only this time they were following movements within one centimeter of space. He panned around the display to show the tracers in three dimensions. A few people gasped. He stuck both hands out above the device, and a detailed 3-D picture of them appeared on the screen. He pulled up a block of virtual clay and, in a few seconds, sculpted a Bart Simpson–like character in thin air and spun it around for the audience to see from all angles. “I’m very proud that that is now possible,” he said simply. The audience cheered. In the days that followed, a stream of curious conference attendees flowed into the Leap Motion tent behind the Austin Convention Center. Most of them had never heard of the product before, but they understood its implications. Leap Motion is not about gesture control. As Holz explained in his demo, it’s about ushering in a new era in which people interact with digital information as directly and naturally as if it were real. “Everywhere there’s a computer can benefit from this type of interaction,” he’d said. “That means things like tablets and phones but also things like robotic surgery.” By Tom Foster [PS] popsci/technology/article/2013-07/will-these-guys-kill-computer-interface-we-know-it
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 05:14:01 +0000
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