Virtual Reality  

A biomedical engineering student from Portugal has used Leap Motion controller and Oculus Rift Headset to create an app in which you can interact with a 3D reconstruction of a human brain and its network of connectivity graphs.

Filipe Rodrigues, a biomedical engineering student from Lisbon, Portugal has created a way to examine brain connectivity in virtual reality as part of his research.  The system uses a Leap Motion Controller and Oculus Rift headset.

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“In the beginning, I wanted to develop a haptic glove that I could use with Leap Motion in a virtual reality scenario, allowing me to feel the stuff I touched.” He explained, “For example, when I interrupt brain connectivity, I want to feel the vibrating on my fingers. That was the initial goal for my thesis. I’m still working on it, but I got too involved with the software part of it. I’m loving working with Leap Motion so I’ve postponed the glove component of the project a bit.”

"It’s a good way to visualize complex concepts and try to make them as appealing as possible. Leap Motion is a great tool for this."

The experiment uses slices of MRI scans and Multimodal Brain Connectivity Analysis to reconstruct a 3D model of the brain. Using tractography images, the user is able to see how regions of the brain are connected to each other. Based on this information, a matrix can be drawn of all the connected regions.

“Turning a boring 2D [MRI] visualization into a 3D interactive one is a great way of appealing to people who are maybe not from this discipline,” Rodriques told Leap Motion, “It’s a good way to visualize complex concepts and try to make them as appealing as possible. Leap Motion is a great tool for this.”

The goal is that for every interruption your hand makes on the graph, information would pop up about exactly what you’re interacting with. He’d also like to expand the interaction design to make the project as accessible as possible for the general user.

SOURCE  Leap Motion

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 Virtual Reality  

Leap Motion has announced a virtual reality headset developer mount and a new API that together promises to take VR out of the realm of science fiction.

Since announcing their version of a motion sensor that provided higher fidelity than the Microsoft Kinect, and other devices, Leap Motion has been pushing the technology envelope.

Now, instead of using their sensor in front of a computer to track your hand and fingers, the team at Leap Motion have incorporated the device into a virtual reality headset to provide augmented views of your hands while in a VR environment.

"There are real implications for this in medicine, health and certain types of businesses."

The API feeds raw infrared imagery straight from the sensors to the controller on the headset, giving users a real time view of the environment. With the sensors' capabilities, combined with Leap Motion's hand tracking software, the experience allowed for means that old fashioned VR gloves are not needed.  All you need are your hands.

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According to the company's press release written by founder and CTO David Holz,

One of the most exciting things to us about virtual reality is that our technology can be more than just your hands – it can be your eyes as well. This builds off the release of a new API which opens up raw infrared imagery straight from our sensors. When mounted directly onto a head-worn display, these images become stereoscopic windows into the world around you. What it sees, you see.

According to Leap Motion, virtual reality should feel as smooth and seamless as the real world and with the Leap Motion control, it feels instantaneous.

Along with virtual reality applications like gaming, Leap Motion has put the challenge out to developers to use the Leap Motion VR system to develop night vision applications. A project the company also announced codenamed “Dragonfly,” is designed to be embedded by virtual reality component makers and will possesses "greater-than-HD image resolution, color and infrared imagery, and a significantly larger field of view."

Developers won't have to haul out the duct tape to start working on applications either. To help their community explore this paradigm, Leap Motion is releasing a VR Developer Mount along with a new software development kit (SDK). The kit will be available from the company's online store for $19.99 US and allows developers to easily and consistently attach and remove the Leap Motion Controller from a VR headset such as the Oculus Rift.

It's not just gamers who will benefit from the advances in the VR industry such as Leap's new API.

"This type of imaging will probably go further than gaming," Susan Schreiner, an analyst at C4 Trends, told TechNewsWorld. "There are real implications for this in medicine, health and certain types of businesses."




SOURCE  Leap Motion

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 Computer Interfaces  

Leap Motion’s motion-tracking software just got much better. The company has released Version 2 of their software to developers in a public beta. The update allows developers to create applications that can make use of very subtle finger and joint movements.

Motion tracker maker Leap Motion has released their free Version 2 software to developers in a public beta. The update is available to developers now, and does not require any new hardware to implement.

The company wants developers to be the first to work with V2 before the new version receives its consumer release.

"V2 tracking is a critical step forward on this path: it makes it much easier for developers to build transformative applications that are consistent with this vision."

According to the Leap Motion blog, this is the first of several major updates to come before the consumer release. The significance of the update is that the new version will make it possible for developers to leverage more intricate tracking capabilities, for building greater content.

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According to the post, V2 retains the speed and positional accuracy found in V1, but the software also now tracks the actual joints and bones inside each of the user’s fingers. This leads to some immediate benefits over V1:

• -Finger and hand labels – every finger, hand, and joint now has anatomical labels like ‘pinky’, ‘left hand’, and ‘proximal phalanges’
• -Occlusion robustness – fingers are tracked even when they’re not seen by the controller, as might happen if you turned your hands completely vertically or intertwined the fingers of your left and right hands
• -Massively improved resistance to ambient infrared light – sunlight, powerful halogens, etc.
• -Much more granular data for developers about the user’s hands and fingers – 27 dimensions per hand, in addition to special parameters like grab/pinch APIs

Leap Motion claims the new version will allow users to reach into the screen and interact with applications in the same way we interact with the physical world every day.

This means taking things like sculpting a lump of clay, snapping together building blocks, or learning to play an instrument – the types of actions 99% of people just won’t or can’t do on a computer with traditional input devices like a mouse and keyboard. For instance, Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX have used Leap Motion to build a Tony Stark-inspired CAD interface. They system potentially allows instantly accessibility to anyone who knows how to interact with interfaces that mimic interactions they use with their hands in the real world.

Of course, this was the promise of the Leap Motion system when it was first introduced.  The new update looks to overcome some of the glitches and bugs that the initial release did not fully account for. With this beta release to developers, the company hopes to release a consumer version that really works as promised.



SOURCE  Leap Motion

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 Computer Interfaces  

Prototype 'ultrahaptic' technology developed at the University of Bristol allows users to feel when they control their computers with mid-air hand movements.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have demonstrated a mid-air tactile feedback prototype system that allows people to interact with computer interfaces by touching invisible fields in the air above them while performing gestures.

UltraHaptics allows people interacting with a screen to feel what is displayed and also receive invisible information before touching it.

The technology works through the use of acoustic radiation force, projected through ultrasonic transducers. These emit very high frequency sound waves which when they meet mid-air, create a sensation on a person's skin.

By combining several waves, the researchers were able to create multiple points of tactile feedback with different properties that can be distinguished by users.

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One of the researchers working on the UltraHaptics project, PhD student Tom Carter, said current multi-touch systems with integrated interactive surfaces allow users to use them with their bare hands, but people cannot feel what is on the screen.

The researchers aimed to build in haptic feedback into existing interactive surfaces without sacrificing their ease of use and accessibility.

"To achieve this, we have designed a system with an ultrasound transducer array positioned beneath an acoustically transparent display," Carter said.  The team also used a Leap Motion sensor to capture the user's hand motions and position.

"This arrangement allows the projection of focused ultrasound through the interactive surface and directly onto the users' bare hands. By creating multiple simultaneous feedback points, and giving them individual tactile properties, users can receive localized feedback associated to their actions."



SOURCE  The Guardian

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 Computer Interfaces  

SpaceX founder Elon Musk, has just posted the promised video demonstrating the Iron Man-inspired 3D modeling computer interface he has been hinting at for the past few days.

Elon Musk, has just posted the promised video demonstrating the Iron Man-inspired 3D modeling computer interface he has been hinting at for the past few days.

The team at SpaceX is exploring methods for engineers to accelerate their workflow by designing more directly in 3D, and admidetly they are referring directly to methods used by the character Tony Stark in the Iron Man films.

By integrating breakthroughs in sensor and visualization technologies they can now view and modify designs more naturally and efficiently than just by using purely 2D tools.

Designing a rocket part w hand gestures & then 3D printing it in a metal superalloy ... http://t.co/h3KoyAb0Lt
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 5, 2013

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"We are just beginning, but eventually hope to build the fastest route between the idea of a rocket and the reality of the factory floor."
Combining the gesture-sensing Leap Motion controller with an array of different display technologies (like the Oculus Rift VR handset, a 3D Projector, or a translucent glass display that looks like it was pulled right out of Starks’ lab) and a modified version of the Siemens NX design suite, SpaceX’s engineers are able to zoom around and inspect their models without ever touching a mouse.

While the video shows Elon and his engineers doing things like scaling, rotating, and even cutting away at meshes, it never demonstrates anyone building something from scratch.  Musk comments that this is just the begining of using tools like this for design and manufacturing.  Obviously, the setup in the video was not used to create the rocket parts from concept at this stage, however what the team has pulled together does point a potential direction for development in the future.

In the video, SpaceX’s team is also able to send their models straight to a metal 3D printer that uses either titanium or Inconel to fabricate parts and prototypes.


SOURCE  SpaceX

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 Computer Interfaces

A start-up company, Leap Motion have built a device about the size of a cigarette lighter that contains three tiny cameras inside. It attaches to a computer and turns any PC or Mac into a gesture-recognition device. The idea is similar to the one behind Microsoft’s Kinect, the device that lets people play games just by moving their hands and body.

Where Microsoft's Kinect brought the idea of 3D motion tracking to mainstream adoption in the marketplace, the 3D camera's low, 640x480 resolution, moderate input lag, and bulky form factor have somewhat limited its use cases.

Now, a new startup called Leap Motion wants to revolutionize the motion-tracking space with a chewing-gum-pack-sized 3D sensor that promises sub-millimeter accuracy.

Leap Motion claims its small sensor creates a "three-dimensional interaction space" of four cubic meters that can track the 3D position and orientation of individual fingers and even thin objects like pencils in real time, all to a tolerance of one-hundredth of a millimeter.

The company says the breakthrough in resolution comes not from the hardware, which consists of relatively standard parts, but from what CTO David Holz calls "a number of major algorithmic and mathematical problems that had not been solved or were considered unsolvable."


In the video demo below prepared for Cult of Mac, Holz demonstrates what appear to be very responsive and accurate gestures with his finger tips and hands.  Some may argue that as for replacing the mouse, the Leap Motion interface might not be comfortable over long stretches, however with the kind of performance exhibited in the video, the device is intriguing.  Moreover, the Kinect has been very successful for Microsoft and is being extended into a number of uses, including robotics.  If Leap Motion can do the same via its developer program, it may be an ideal device for robotic sensing and much more.

The San Francisco-based company has just started taking preorders for the $69.99 PC- and Mac-compatible device, which it plans to ship in December. It's unclear exactly what apps the system will support at that time, but the company told CNET it has plans to offer up 15,000 to 20,000 free development kits to kick-start the software market on its open platform.






SOURCE  Core 77

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