Leap Motion - Current Efficiency?

[jimh20]

Hi,
It's early days for me with Flyinside and lots to learn. I tend to lose the mouse cursor and can't readily find it again. That has made me wonder about Leap Motion? I've seen lots of really bad reports about it in the past.

Is anyone using LM with Flyinside and P3D (or FSX), and finding it easy and efficient around the cockpit? Does LM impose an unwelcome extra load on the computer? How does LM avoid interference with head tracking, being stuck on the front of the CV1?

Any up to date info would be very interesting.

Regards, Jim

[Haw-Boo]

I have just got my Oculus CV1, Leap Motion (using Orion), and FI, and its the best thing I have ever experienced. Easy to navigate and control things in the cockpit. Feels and reacts very natural etc. No problems with OR CV1 tracking.

You can press buttons, flick switches, and anything like rotary (or I guess axis) based brings up a type of slider bar to scroll through its values or position.

Personally I think its great, problem for me now is I will never be able to flight sim again without this kit

[Francois]

In my opinion I don't really enjoy the Leap controls.
1. It is rather accurate in tracking hand position, but it was struggling with my finger gestures.
2. I struggled to not accidentally toggle switches, and often ended pulling levers accidentally while I was trying to position my hands over a specific switch.
3. Some of the switches are positions in such a way that I needed to reach under my desk to 'reach' them, which results in a loss of tracking.

That said, it was really cool seeing my hands in the game. And it is ENTIRELY possible that I did not calibrate things correctly. At the moment I use focus tracking, and a button on my yoke to trigger switch toggles. I would love to hear from people that actually got this working.

[Haw-Boo]

I have to agree, I also experienced the problem of controls being under the desk and wish my room was big enough to push my chair back further. But its the same all round, and you have to remember the size of the virtual cockpit as its bigger than you think, and in my case almost my room

Its a strange thing not being able to see your hands, and am going through the thought process of how to deal with that. So at the moment I am trying out mixing technologies, so leap motion and other control hardware.

On another note. One thing I found last night in the FI menu was you can enable the Leap Motion unit as a form of lowish resolution camera, and this provides a way of seeing your room. I love this idea as (being fully immersed) we can not only check everything is OK in the room, but it might be possible to see the keyboard etc. Although its full screen, it might be handy to make it resizeable in smaller window so we can still see the cockpit etc.

As you know the oculus lens design means we cannot see smaller text/numerical details well, but if we lean closer they become really clear. I am sure other have already found this, but last night I also stumbled on binoculars and a magnifying glass, these really help to see some of the smaller text/numerical displays by zooming in areas of the display making text/numerics really clear! Very happy with that, as its a good workaround.

Sorry for all my extra findings blurb, loving getting stuck in to the new technology.

[jimh20]

Hi Guys,
I think there must be lots of us learners about. I'm more than a bit lost over the options in the FI menu.
I've got a couple of new questions:

What's Focus Tracking? It sounds interesting.

I've been using the mild binocular magnifier, but where can I find the magnifier?

I'm still interested in Leap Motion but I'm going to wait for any more interesting comments .

At the moment I depend heavily on my copilot from Multi Crew Experience working the panel for me. The 38 buttons on my stick and throttle are all fully occupied. Any new need will have to be traded with a button already in use.

Cheers, Jim

[Haw-Boo]

Hi.

Regarding the settings in FI, I believe someone is planning to create a guide to cover those, and most are waiting on that. Personally it will be good to have, as I think a lot of people are reaching the same level of questions. I tried to search for "Focus Tracking", but sorry no hits.

For me the magnifier was a couple of options down from binoculars on the Bind menu, you just need to bind a spare button (cough ) to it. The two a slightly different, and I plan to fiddle around more with them later. I am using the latest release of FI, so might be worth checking you have the same. Also I am using FSX-SE.

FYI: I have also run out of buttons, so am looking to "shifted" keys/buttons solutions to resolve that. In case you don't know what that is, it means you assign a button to act like a shift key that allows you to assign different functionality to the same buttons/keys. So (for example) if I press fire it fires, but if i press my shift button and fire it could do something else.

Good idea to wait on Leap Motion, if you have not already done so I would also recommend searching YouTube to get further examples and ideas of how it behaves. Hopefully we can encourage more to chip in on this thread. I waited and researched LM and in the end just went for it, but knowing I would still being using (in combination) a flight stick (hotas?) of some sorts. I agree with all comment so far, however in my view there are 2 things to be considered a) how leap motion works, and b) a slight change in the way we use our hands. So I changed the way I used my hands to better define movements and gestures in LM to provide the best results, so hence why for "me" I would say it works fine. But yes some controls can clash/miss-trigger with the LM hand, but in my view its also very particular to the aircraft/cockpit being used. For example a Cessna everything is pretty much in front of you down to the floor, so everything basically easily reached. Where as (on the other hand) a 737 has a more complex flight deck layout and you can find possible miss-triggers there. There is a small amount of tolerance/bite point with hands and triggering in LM, but it can sometimes happen. I have not been over all the settings in everything, so there might be something to help this further. For example last night I noticed we can change the scale of the LM hand, so i will tinker around with that later too as that might provide more accurate results. Although I have to admit the size of the default hand seems just right, and might then seem odd to make it smaller, but again its worth ticking off the list.

Hope this all helps.

[Francois]

Yeah, the LM hands do feel pretty good and I do hope that we can get them working properly. I'll try and tinker some more this weekend. I think that it needs is some sort of finger gesture to trigger a click. Right now it feels like you have magnetic fingers that triggers events as you get too close.

[admin]

Finger gestures (and a manual) are underway It's just a huge time investment, I want to get it right and cover everything!

[Francois]

Finger gestures (and a manual) are underway It's just a huge time investment, I want to get it right and cover everything!

You are the man!

[cobraj]

Haw-Boo can you email me your setup? I have the Oculus and Leap and want to use it in game with clickable cockpit and hands if possible. I'm having issues with Leap and what to install and how to install it. If anyone else has a working setup and maybe a back up install of your installs I would appreciate the help. How to's would also be helpful.

Thank you in advance!


Regards,
Cobraj
DCS / Air Group 51 Commander
airgroup51.net

Cobraj@ptd.net