I've spent about two days with the Leap Motion Controller, a Kinect-like PC accessory that uses infrared sensors to translate the motions of your hands into input for applications. The device I received is one I pre-ordered more than a year ago; I've been anxiously awaiting its arrival ever since I saw the first video of the device in action.

The Leap costs $79.99, and for your money you get a tiny little aluminum rectangle. It fits easily in the palm of my hand, and once situated on the desk it's essentially invisible. There are precisely two external features: the green power LED and its USB port.

When it's powered on, a trio of faintly glowing red lights are visible through the smoked glass top—presumably the infrared sources. The device's field of view extends in a dome, up to 25 cm tall and quite wide—there's a pretty big area in which your hands and fingers and pencils and whatnots will be picked up.

With visions of Minority Report dancing in my head, I connected the Leap Motion and installed its applications. The first thing you see, after downloading and running the install package, is a beautifully crafted orientation application. Light cascades across the screen as you drag your fingers through the Leap's field of view, and soft ambient music pulses. It's amazing. The application is, in fact, far and away the best part of using the Leap.

Video: Using the Leap

A short video showing what it's like to use the Leap Motion Controller.

The above video captures both the orientation app and what happens after the orientation app. The main Leap desktop application is called "Airspace," and it functions like a launcher. Leap-enabled applications downloaded from the Airspace Store show up here and can be launched; the applications can also be launched directly without starting up the Airspace app.

The Airspace Store mimics the standard app store model, with third-party applications organized by category. Some are free; most are not. There are currently 75 apps in the store split across different categories. Most of the apps are for both Windows and OS X, but not all of them; there are several Windows exclusives and several Mac exclusives.

I have so far stuck to the free apps, though with Gaming Editor Kyle Orland's help, we're going to dive much deeper into the Leap app store in the next week or so. My impression so far is not positive, though.

Here's the thing: the Leap Motion is almost amazing. When using it to interact with my desktop and perform actions (clicking, dragging, scrolling), the experience is about 50 percent fluid intuition and 50 percent screaming frustration. There are moments, sometimes ten or fifteen seconds long, when everything magically clicks into place—the Leap doesn't decide your hand is too far away or too close to be able to execute actions, and for a few seconds, boom, you're scrolling, dragging, and clicking effortlessly. It feels totally natural. Then, almost capriciously, your gestures aren't good enough any more and you spend ten more seconds trying to get a single click to register.

Gaming is a similarly mixed bag, at least with the freebie collection I tried. Block 54, a Jenga-like tower game bundled with the controller, was a particularly frustrating experience, with a control scheme apparently designed by a crazed alien sadist. I was heartened to see that Cut the Rope was another one of the pack-in games—I've certainly spent enough hours with the iOS version, and I thought I'd have a great time playing in 3D space with my fingers. Sadly, the experience was powerfully unintuitive, and the Leap version had a lot of trouble distinguishing when and where I wanted to cut the eponymous rope.

One problem is arm fatigue—holding your hand within the Leap's field of view in a comfortable fashion might require some workstation adjustment. I found that if I rested my elbow on my chair's arm, my hand wasn't at an angle that the Leap particularly liked to register; I spent quite a bit of time moving things around to overcome arm tiredness so that I could play with my elbow supported.

We’ll try again, and soon

The Leap is neat, but it's not much more than that. It's absolutely not in the same class of convenience as a touchscreen, primarily because interaction with it is so iffy and inconsistent. Lots of fiddling with the Leap control panel and attempting to tune its sensing distance and re-calibrate the device didn't yield any noticeable improvement—it's just new hardware, and it's got some growing pains to experience.

But it's cool—it's extremely cool. It's not yet a game-changing interface device, but it could be. The exciting thing is that now that the Leap is shipping, the number of developers who get their hands on the thing should greatly increase, so the amount of cool things the Leap can do will also climb.

We'll be going deeper into the Leap and some of its launch apps, particularly the games, over the next week or so. For now, if you're interested in picking one up yourself, you can grab it directly from the manufacturer.

Listing image by Lee Hutchinson / Aurich Lawson