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Mine came in last Friday. Plugged it in, got it set up.
It's kind of nifty. It comes with Cut the Rope and a visualization app pre-loaded with the free Airspace account.
Cut the Rope is.. tricky with the LEAP. The input is questionably implemented, here, IMO. It uses speed to decide whether you're simply moving the cursor or making a cut, and it's hard to be precise (particularly with start and stopping points) and fast at the same time. So lots of botched cuts (cutting multiple strings when you only meant to cut one) and the game not registering that you were trying to cut and just moving the cursor past the string, instead.
When you hit it right, though, it was kind of a novel feeling to say to yourself "I'm playing a video game without touching anything." I suppose this is the same kind of feeling one would get with Kinect, but I haven't really used Kinect much.
The visualization was pretty neat, though. It walks through a series of different visualization sequences, increasing in complexity. The first shows a gently swirling swarm of pinpricks of light, and when you move your hand around, some of them turn yellow and follow your motion. Then, the next sequence adds a 3d perspective of the bounding box to approximate the size and shape of the LEAP's detection field, and then gently rotates it around so you can get a feel for the boundaries of the available area.
Next up, it replaces the swirling dots with a wireframe image of your hand(s), and you can see the fidelity with which it can read the movements of your fingers. Of course, this is the spot where I started to pick up on the limitations, too -- as a single camera system, it will "lose" fingers as they pass in front of/behind each other, or point in a direction radial to the camera. Understandable restrictions, but naturally, this will limit the variety and type of gestures you can use. I can't help but wonder whether a dual-LEAP system in the future might be able to improve upon that, and whether a) the market would be receptive to that as a good value, and b) whether anybody will pursue it from a driver/implementation angle.
Finally, the visualization app lets you paint on screen. I like this a lot better than Cut the Rope, in that it gives you a cursor for each finger (it's a multitouch input!) that starts as an open circle, and closes and finally glows as you move each finger towards the screen, indicating you want to paint instead of reposition your finger/cursor. This takes a little acclimation, but feels much more satisfying and precise than Cut the Rope's "move fast to substitute for a click" implementation.
I haven't had time to poke around the Airspace App Store yet. When work slows down, I think I'll bring it in and see how I like it as a multi-touch input for a Win8 desktop. It might actually make Win8 make sense.
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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
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