Leap Motion is an inexpensive Kinect-like 3D sensor that made waves when it was announced months ago thanks to its high fidelity low-latency tracking. The company recently announced a partnership with HP to bring Leap technology to HP products. If you’ve been following the Ultrabook realm closely as we have, you’ll know that Intel has been pushing their ‘Perceptual Computing‘ initiative in an attempt to take Ultrabooks and PCs to the next level of human-computer interaction with natural inputs like touch, gesture, voice, etc. It seems like HP may be attempting to leap-frog Intel in that regard.
Intel has been teasing that they hope to eventually build in perceptual computing hardware, like the Creative Gesture Camera, directly into Ultrabooks. This would likely supplant the boring old webcam in the bezel, and add a stereo depth camera for detecting faces, hands, and more.
That’s exactly what Leap does, and it does it, perhaps, better than anyone else at this point:
The announcement of the “strategic collaboration” makes clear what HP intends to do with Leap.
“The relationship will start with the Leap Motion Controller bundled with select HP products and evolve to unique HP devices embedded with Leap Motion’s technology,” it says.
It’s likely that the first devices that will be embedded with Leap will be all-in-one desktops from HP, but Ultrabooks could come down the road as well. Will that happen before Intel executes its own perceptual computing Ultrabook plans? We’re not sure, but this certainly puts the companies in an interesting position.
