There has been rather a lot of interest recently in the 3D motion sensing device Leap by San Franciscan company Leap Motion. While the company CTO was somewhat reluctant to talk about The Leap’s modus operandi / camera / sensor, he was more than happy to give Cult of Mac a demonstration of Leap in action. Watch the video here.

We met David Holz of Leap Motion who demonstrated for the Cult of Mac TV crew the San Fran startup’s new Leap 3D motion sensing device. It’s been dubbed in various tech media as a “Kinect-killer,” but it’s really not. The new Leap is quite different to the large-field-of-view, whole-body Kinect, instead providing a rapidly responsive, meticulous fingertip sensitivity in a small, 4 cubic ft space in front of the computer screen.

I had a play with it and found myself easily splatting on-screen pineapples, lemons and grapefruit with intuitive finger motions. It works a treat.

Leap Motion company claims that The Leap is backward-compatible with any number of touch-screen applications and they hope to attract thousands of developers for future new apps employing the technology. And, David added, it works great with Mac!

Leap is a tiny box about the size of an iPod with small USB input. It will be available from next year for $70.

Just imagine what Apple could do with tech like this. Could we see a buy-out?