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Leap by Leap Motion

While the computer mouse is losing ground to touchscreens, Leap Motion is offering an alternative to both technologies: fine motion—capture gesture control. Smaller than a stick of butter, the company's $70 Leap motion-capture device provides an 8-cubic-foot gesture-control space in front of the PC or Mac monitor. Unlike the full-body skeleton-mapping technique used by Microsoft's Kinect, the Leap uses infrared sensors to create an extremely detailed 3D point-cloud representation of just the user's hands. It can sense movement to an accuracy of 0.01 mm. Leap opens up everything on a computer to gesture control: Websites zoom in with the same pinch motion used on touchscreens, and drawing is no more difficult than painting with your fingers—or even a pencil—in midair. That makes the Leap more intuitive than other drawing tools, such as pen tablets, which require the user to draw on a desk while looking at a screen. With Leap, drawing happens in the air, directly in front of the image you are creating.