Looking for altertative ways of Human–computer interaction, I found www.leapmotion.com, which looks promising. They say in the website and in some interviews that they will release this device to the market in winter 2012, and they have a pre-order page on the web site.
Has anyone found any evidence that this is not a scam?
The word "scam" suggests fraudulence - a deliberate intention to deceive. It is a strong accusation, and we should be careful about wielding it without evidence.
Given Leap Motion claim that they will not charge until the product is shipped and that they bill via credit-card, which enables consumers and the banks to recover their money if they charge without delivering, this is not a scam.
That still leaves other options.
It may be vaporware and never get delivered. The fact they had a unit to deliver to Wired [Hat-tip Oliver.] is evidence suggesting this is not the case, but not proof that they can get the item into production as planned.
The Wired article warns:
In person, the pre-production version of the Leap is as impressive as the demo video. Once we have the production model in our hands, we’ll be able to determine if Leap Motion transfers all the magic of its demo unit into the final shipping product.
Another risk is that the actual device may not work as well as the advertising has suggested. It may not be as game-changing as hyped. For example, Wired warns:
without something concrete to place one’s hands and fingers on, there’s the potential for fatigue after using the system for an entire day
In fact, this is a well-known limitation to human (primate?) physiology that has been understood for decades:
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.
This isn't a quality reference, so I am just using it to illustrate a point - that a "Minority Report"-style user interface may not actually be the ideal UI system for the future.
These caveats are not suggestions that the product is a scam, but that there are normal business risks in dealing with yet-to-be-released products.
No leapmotion is not a scam in the same sense that a ponzi scheme or a perpetual motion machine is a scam. Wired has tested it and found it to be a useful system.
This does not mean that leapmotion will end up being a world-beating system, or that it will even be released. There are hundreds of things that can come between a working, effective prototype and a best-selling production system that are nothing to do with being a 'scam'. There is no way to evaluate these factors at this stage.
