Leap Motion is not a part of the Leap Frog series and is its own product and brand. The idea was originally to not need a keyboard by capturing the motions of the hands to simulate them on the screen. Additionally, the device was rather cheap and revolutionary at the time of its release but since it was more of a cool toy, the device didn’t make as big of a launch as many thought it might. It can track your movements down to the finger part level, which is more advanced than current VR devices. The only problem was that the device didn’t provide resistance, which made it hard to like.
The News is: Mobile
While it still has its current problems, the Leap Motion has made the transfer to the mobile device. While the community has modded their own phones to take it on things such as the Cardboard and the Gear VR, Leap Motion made some severe improvement and will be releasing a version that will take up even less power so that it can be naturally utilized with phones. There will be several phones, in the near future, that support a compatibility with the device.
Actual Mobile VR is Possible
I’ve written several flaming articles to explain that you simply won’t get the full VR experience on a mobile platform, but my developer friends over in the mobile VR market already understand what I mean by this. In its current form, this is not possible because there’s too much input and too much data for that little phone processor and GPU to handle. Leap Motion’s move is the first of its kind to condense data rather than expand on it so that it takes up less power to process. They’ve refined the motion output to give the phone less input to handle, which is absolutely brilliant. This was the first step to giving the mobile platform true VR capability, but there are a few more before it is complete.
Why is it Important For Fitness?
The true importance of this comes from what we do with our hands whenever we exercise in real life. If you practice Martial Arts or Sports then you will likely know that you exhaust more energy if you miss. Some of us train with that in mind, utilizing it so that it’s easier for us when we do hit something. Leap Motion provides a mobile way to use VR for such a practice while also give us the controllers we need for the mobile platform.
This isn’t the end, but we’re getting to it very quickly. A few things need to happen in order to achieve full VR on the phone: Staggered Rendering, Hardware Native Upscaling, and Render Filling. These methods are currently apart of the PC world, but not the VR world. If we could achieve these in VR, the mobile platform could experience Full VR, not the best VR, but more than an Arcade or YouTube landing page version of it.
