It's intuitive, as you can see in the clip below, but it's also extremely quick. There's no significant latency to make you second-guess your moves. And since Captive works with any device that has both a camera and a decent amount of computing power, you could use it on everything from your laptop to your smartphone.

A practical implementation of Captive is likely some ways off, since that would require both a mass-produced cube (the existing object is 3D-printed) and integrating support into apps. However, this is one of those why-didn't-we-think-of-this-sooner discoveries that could easily find its way into 3D modeling tools, games (there's a whiff of PlayStation Move to it) and other software that could benefit from quick and easy 3D control.