A look a the Leap Motion: Seeing your hands in VR

In many VR demos you are just a floating head in space. For me, this breaks the immersion as it makes me feel like I am not really part of the virtual world. Demos that include a body feel more immersive, but they are also a bit frustrating. I want my avatar’s hands to move when my hands do. To experiment with getting my hands into the scene, I got a Leap Motion controller.

When using the Leap with the Rift, you need to mount it on the Rift itself using a small plastic bracket. You can purchase the bracket from Leap but they also make the model available  on Thingiverse so you can print one out yourself should you have a 3D printer. (I do and I thought that was very cool. I really felt like I was living in the future printing out a part for my VR system.)

Once I got the mount printed out and attached to my Rift and completed the Leap setup instructions, I gave some of the VR demos available a try. Seeing hands in the scene really made it feel a lot more immersive, but what really upped the immersion was seeing hands that looked almost like mine. The leap development package includes a nice variety of hand models (by their naming conventions, I’m a light salt) and that variety is greatly appreciated.

When running the demos, the biggest problems I had with the Leap were false positive hands (extra hands) in the scene, having my hands disappear rather suddenly, and poor tracking of my fingers. Two things that helped were making sure  the Rift cables were  not in front of the Leap controller and removing or covering reflective surfaces in my office (particularly the arm rest on my chair). Even with those changes, having the perfect office setup for the Leap is still a work in progress.

I’ve downloaded the Unity core assets and I’ll be talking more about developing for the Leap using Unity in future posts. Here’s a preview of what I am working on: