Leap Motion motion tracking system

Leap Motion's not the household name Kinect is, but it should be — the company's motion-tracking system is more powerful, more accurate, smaller, cheaper, and just more impressive. Leap CTO David Holz came by the Verge's New York offices to give us a demo of the company's upcoming product (called The Leap), and suffice to say we're only begrudgingly returning to our mice and keyboards.

The Leap uses a number of camera sensors to map out a workspace of sorts — it's a 3D space in which you operate as you normally would, with almost none of the Kinect's angle and distance restrictions. Currently the Leap uses VGA camera sensors, and the workspace is about three cubic feet; Holz told us that bigger, better sensors are the only thing required to make that number more like thirty feet, or three hundred. Leap's device tracks all movement inside its force field, and is remarkably accurate, down to 0.01mm. It tracks your fingers individually, and knows the difference between your fingers and the pencil you're holding between two of them.