Leap Motion's mission is to remove the barriers between people and technology. This guide has everything you need to jumpstart your VR project.
Leap Motion's mission is to remove the barriers between people and technology. This guide has everything you need to jumpstart your VR project.
Our technology tracks the movement of your hands and fingers, so you can reach into virtual and augmented reality to interact with new worlds.
Leap Motion technology is designed to track hands and fingers with high accuracy, low processing power, and near-zero latency. Our PC developer kit is designed to attach to the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or other Windows-based VR headset. This brings powerful, natural, human interaction to virtual reality.
As an optical tracking platform, Leap Motion can only track what it can see (or infer). It is best suited for:
We recommend you avoid:
The rest of this guide covers the key development resources you need to get started, along with design best practices.
The two main VR game engines are Unity and Unreal. Leap Motion provides extensive resources for Unity, with greater support for Unreal in development.
All Unity assets can be found at developer.leapmotion.com/unity.
Leap Motion support for Unreal Engine 4 is provided through a native plugin that is packaged with the engine. Currently only Windows development is supported. More information can be found at github.com/getnamo/leap-ue4.
For more insights, see our full series on Explorations in VR Design.
In the real world, we never think twice about using our hands to control objects. We instinctively know how. The “physical” design of UI elements in VR should guide the user in using the interface. Good interactions include:
Text and tutorial prompts are often essential elements of interactive design:
Projectiles from the Weightless: Remastered Training Room were designed to suggest how they should be held. This led to a higher rate of users grabbing by placing their fingers in the indents, making it much easier to successfully release the projectiles.
The Leap Motion Interaction Engine is designed to handle low-level physics interactions in VR. With it, users can grab objects of a variety of shapes and textures, as well as multiple objects. To design grabbable objects for VR, build with affordances – physical characteristics that guide the user in using that object.
Everything should be reactive. People enjoy playing with game physics, pushing the boundaries and seeing what’s possible. With that in mind, every interactive object should respond to any casual movement, especially if the user might pick it up.
User interfaces designed for VR should combine 3D effects and satisfying sound effects with dynamic visual cues. VR menus tend to fall into two categories:
The hand interface from Blocks. Buttons only appear when your left hand is in this position.
Any form of simulated locomotion has the potential to make users feel sick. However, there are a few effective techniques when your users need to navigate a large virtual world:
Sound is an essential aspect of truly immersive VR. Combined with hand tracking and visual feedback, it even has the power to create the illusion of tactile sensation. Use sound for:
Blocks includes a wide range of interactions. For this reason, we built it with a tutorial stage that walks the user through different elements of the experience. Here’s how these interactions combine to create a magical experience.
Thumbs up to continue. The “thumbs up” is consistently used around the world to mean “OK.” Just in case, our tutorial robot shows you how.
Pinch with both hands to create a block. This interaction can be difficult to describe in words, but the user understands instantly when they see how the robot does it. The entire interaction is built with visual and sound cues:
Grab a block. This is as direct and natural as it gets – something we’ve all done since childhood. Reach out and grab it with your hand.
Turn gravity on and off. Deactivating gravity is a broad, sweeping interaction for something that massively affects the world around you. The act of raising up with your hands feels like it fits with the “lifting up” of the blocks you’ve created. Similarly, restoring gravity requires the opposite – bringing both of your hands down.
Change the block shape. This can be done with an arm interface that only appears when the palm of your left hand is facing up. This is an abstract interaction, so the interface has to be very clean and simple. With only three large buttons, spaced far apart, users can play and explore without making irreversible changes.
From there, players have the ability to create stacks, catapults, chain reactions, and more. We can’t wait to see what kinds of experiences you’ll build. If you have any questions, please contact our team directly at community@leapmotion.com.