Hand-tracking company Leap Motion is registering people for its second 3D Jam with more than $50,000 in prizes being offered for apps that use the Leap Motion Controller. Entries must be finished by November 9 and winners will be announced in January.
According to the official rules, Leap Motion will select judges and rate entries based on innovation and execution. The results will be combined with community voting to select winners.
The competition should be fierce because Leap Motion has been building buzz lately with an impressive video from an internal hackathon. The demo, embedded below, is called “AR Screen” and features a VR headset with the company’s own prototype Dragonfly sensor mounted on the front providing a pass-through stereoscopic view of the real world. Together with hand-tracking, keyboard and mouse control, the demonstration shows a user in VR able manage windows and “dim the lights” of the real world for cinematic viewing of a Youtube video.
“The Dragonfly module allowed us to add higher-resolution images with full color, which made the overall experience more immersive,” explained Raffi Bedikian, a Leap Motion software engineer, in a blog post outlining how the experience was made with the company’s software development kit. “Flat digital interfaces were not designed for hands. With this in mind, we designed AR Screen so that much of the input was still driven by the keyboard and mouse.”
Interest in the Dragonfly module soared after the video surfaced. Leap Motion says it is focusing on improving its tracking software first and that “there are smaller challenges, specific to Dragonfly, which need to be ironed out on the software level before we can fully support a wider developer release.”
