Virtual reality: Feeling our way into an uncertain future

I spent some time playing with blocks on Thursday, but first I had to strap a computer to my face. The reason: I had an opportunity to try out Leap Motion’s Orion virtual-reality setup, which tracks your hands so you can use them in whatever scene you see in the headset you’re wearing.

But that was just one vision of virtual reality on display at the Collision conference that took place this week in New Orleans. What’s still uncertain is which of those visions will ultimately prevail in the real world.

Hands-on VR

Leap Motion’s CEO, Michael Buckwald, was one in a long lineup of speakers at Collision, an event put on by the organizers of Web Summit. (I moderated a couple of panels myself.) After Buckwald’s onstage interview Thursday, I saw somebody in the speaker-prep room wearing a VR headset, waving his hands around but grasping at nothing.

I had to check that out. Caleb Krause, chief of staff for the San Francisco company, explained that Leap Motion’s prototype system uses low-res cameras and infrared lights in a small module on the front of the VR headset to detect your hands and represent them in a virtual world.

The Leap Motion demo entailed creating and manipulating virtual blocks with my hands. To create new ones, I pinched my thumb and forefinger together, then moved them apart. As I did, a glowing cube emerged between them, growing like a soap bubble. When I opened up my hand, the finished block tumbled to the virtual ground.

Another gesture caused a simple menu to appear next to my left hand, from which I could tap buttons to switch from creating cubes to spawning rectangular blocks or 20-sided icosahedrons. It was as fascinating as my demos of HTC’s Vive, another VR setup that translates your real-world motions into virtual ones — but Leap Motion’s demo didn’t require a dedicated room or an array of sensor boxes.

Also unlike the Vive, however, Leap Motion’s technology isn’t shipping in VR headsets yet. Buckwald said in his talk that third-party manufacturers should begin adding it to their products by “around the end of this year, probably.”