Got a leap motion for Christmas...

[kolaf 2]

Hi guys,

 

I was very lucky and got a leap motion for Christmas. I have been dying to try it out on my flight simulator, but am having some difficulties with figuring out the best way to utilise it and I was hoping that someone he has some experience they would like to share.

 

My first impulse was to use is as a simple mouse emulator. The concept is quite simple, you move your hand around over the sensor to control the mouse pointer on the screen. This approach has two drawbacks:

1. it is a bit imprecise and it quickly gets tiring to hold your hand in the air while figuring out the pointing.

2. The mouse emulation did not seem to work well with my P3D 2.4 installation, it refused to register any of my virtual mouse clicks.

 

Since this doesn't seem to work very well I'm thinking of two alternative approaches. The first is also quite intuitive, having the leap motion turn my game screen into a touchscreen by detecting when I place my finger on/near the screen and simulating a click. You could for instance use one finger for left click and two fingers for right click. However, I have not found any ready-made application to support this concept which I find a bit weird.

 

My third idea is a bit more flight simulator specific. Instead of using the screen as a touchscreen you could use any kind of flat area as a touch interface. I could for instance printout the overhead panel of a 737 and place the leap motion at the bottom of this. I could then map the depicted switch positions on the panel to float similar to controls, probably through FSUIPC. I could support new planes simply printing out new control interfaces  and calibrating them. I have no idea how easy this would be, but assuming that their SDK is relatively easy to use, it should be no more difficult to do this than to do regular mouse emulation. The only additional step would be the FS UIPC which shouldn't be difficult.

 

I'm writing this post in the hope that maybe some of you have some experience/ideas/no of software that could be useful for integrating the motion with a flight simulator, either FSX or P3D.

 

Merry Christmas.

[raex-flight 3]

Hey,

 

Did you find any pratical way of using the leap motion thing?

john