by Derek Speare » Fri Mar 11, 2016 4:47 pm
Here's my report:
The Leap was easy to setup and get going. I installed the Orion package. All was straightforward. Anyone who has basic knowledge of Windows software installation procedures and UI configuration menus will not have any trouble. First was the calibration, and it went easily. Leap has a preview mode where you can see your hands as it sees them. It uses an IR camera to do the magic. After a few minutes of fiddling I went straight away into FlyInside for FSX (the latest version we have)
Dan's implementation of Leap is really great. I was wondering what I needed to do once it fired up, but there were my hands. I didn't need to do anything other than have the Leap connected for FI to use the Leap. Dan has already included an IR camera passthrough as well, so mashing a button brings up an IR view of your particular world. That's really cool and was unexpected. And no Vive required!
Humans have been relying on texture and relative proximity of objects when interacting with the world around them since we've been humans. The very physical nature of everything is something we never consider but controls every aspect of our existence.
We've been interacting with computers no differently, really. Our impulses to create inputs into our computers gives us very real physical feedback. Typing this is one example! When we're driving, flying or anything, we rely on physical cues controlling our behaviour at any point in time.
We interact with so many objects in life without seeing them, but touch is what our brains expect to sense when we do. When we go to start our car we put in the key and turn the ignition, know what it feels like to perform the act, and take off for our excursion, never really conscious of of the feel of the many physical things we touched. We rarely - if ever - need to see it to do so.
But what if we didn't receive any tactile cues? What if there was "nothing" really there and you went through the motions, trusting that your hand was in the right place and your conditioned car starting muscle memory acted properly? And say the car started. You'd have to take it on faith that all is "normal", in a relative sense at least. We'd have to make conscious decisions to accept matters, and a conscious "awareness" of interaction is something our brains are not often prone to expect to be required to do.
This is what it's like using the Leap. You can see your virtual hand and you can see the interaction, but the lack of tactile feedback makes it quite unrealistic to use and believe - FOR ME. That we often don't look at objects with which we interact makes it doubly hard to consider the Leap to be anything more than a novelty at this point in time. Surely I agree that there are relevant uses of it right now with many aspects of computing, but those who are into gaming and want instant tactile feedback when interacting with their virtual world should look at keeping what they have now.
My personal example of simply reaching down to throw the landing gear lever was telling enough for me. In a real plane you just do it. I didn't have that success and confidence in my pretend plane when I tried to do the same. While Dan's implementation is fantastic, and the Leap may have other value, for cockpit games it's got a long way to go. Maybe one day an electrical field of some sort will be invented so that it creates a pseudo-real environment of "electrical texture" that gives physical sensations of virtual objects in the open spaces of our physical worlds. Maybe one day!
Derek "BoxxMann" Speare - An old "sim head"
System: i7-5930k | GTX980ti | Evo850 1tb | 32g ram | 2-DSD Button Boxes | Latest OH | CH Sticks | Win10 Pro | FSX:SE | P3D2.5/3 | XP v10/v11 | Leap Orion | CV1/WMR/DK2http://www.derekspearedesigns.com