Michael Raphael at Direct Dimensions has been keeping close track of the soon to be released Leap Motion sensor. Although the video seems to show real time capture and display it has actually been synthesized – not very encouraging. They are claiming to have 200 times more resolution than the Kinect.
Michael notes that, “Leap recently announced a distribution deal with Best Buy and pre-orders are available now for $70 – almost half the current Kinect cost at 200 times the performance – wow!! Seems like Moore’s Law is happening here!
The LeapMotion(LM) does have 200x more resolution than the Kinect, but as many of us on the Dev boards/LM forums have discovered, the hardware is automatically processing the data and interpreting it. What this means is that unlike the Kinect where we can access the raw point cloud from the hardware, LM’s point cloud is already processed by the time it gets down the pipeline.