The theremin is an electronic musical instrument, played by waving your hands in the air. It works by detecting RF capacitance between a pair of antennae and the player's body. You can see the Theremin being played at the YouTube link below.
Playing the theremin is incredibly difficult, due to the lack of tactile feedback. The human body is very poorly equipped to point precisely at an arbitrary position in free space. Only a handful of players can achieve anything better than squeaky science fiction noises and even virtuoso players struggle constantly with intonation. Modern theremin technique depends on a system of discrete hand gestures, which reduce the player's dependency upon coarse proprioception.
If the Leap Motion is to have any real utility, it will need phenomenally sophisticated software, to interpret intent from hand motion rather than simply passing the hand location as a raw input. The human body simply isn't capable of making the kind of movements that the designers of Leap Motion seem to expect, even with a great deal of practice.
Thank you for insight. Really interesting. But popular sci-fi movies features like waving hands in the air / parallel to the floor touch screens // transparent monochrome screens(not HUDs) just seem so obviously wrong to me and I don't understand why so many people fail to see it.
I wonder if you could add some tactile feedback with some precision fans? A grid of fans below your hand and in front of it could provide a gradient of subtle pressure. Or maybe a fan on some sensitive servos that track each fingertip?
As I understand, a problem with the theremin is also that the sensitivity depends on humidity and anything else that affects capacitance, and capacitance also depends of the shape of the hand (and arm position, and body position, etc) and because of that it doesn't directly translate to linear distance coordinates. So it becomes hard to build reliable muscle memory. The leap in principle should be able to avoid these problems, although so far a lot of the software written for it fails at this.
Also, a theremin is always on, you can't for example turn the detection on or off based on the amount of fingers you hold up.
The theremin is an electronic musical instrument, played by waving your hands in the air. It works by detecting RF capacitance between a pair of antennae and the player's body. You can see the Theremin being played at the YouTube link below.
Playing the theremin is incredibly difficult, due to the lack of tactile feedback. The human body is very poorly equipped to point precisely at an arbitrary position in free space. Only a handful of players can achieve anything better than squeaky science fiction noises and even virtuoso players struggle constantly with intonation. Modern theremin technique depends on a system of discrete hand gestures, which reduce the player's dependency upon coarse proprioception.
If the Leap Motion is to have any real utility, it will need phenomenally sophisticated software, to interpret intent from hand motion rather than simply passing the hand location as a raw input. The human body simply isn't capable of making the kind of movements that the designers of Leap Motion seem to expect, even with a great deal of practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptq_N-gjEpI