10 years ago there was a booming scene of open source natural user interface projects. People building huge multitouch interfaces, experimenting, releasing open SLAM tools, and exploring what you could do with DIY AR/VR/projection maping/natural feature tracking/gesture interfaces. Post the success of the first Oculus dev release all of the forums went quiet, the git repos started being unmaintained and outright scrubbed. The main contributors to the community got scooped up by the motherships and any supporting technologies locked down in what felt like about six months to a year. Leap Motion was a standout company from that time. They have been selling the exact product they built then with almost no improvement until recently. Somehow they weathered the storm, didn't sell, and are doing some really neat stuff now. Structure IO took up the stewardship of OpenNI and if you look hard enough you can still find cross platform installers that have the banned original kinect tech that Apple bought and is extremely litigious about keeping off the internet.
Sigh. Yeah. Last year I was kludging some optical hand-and-stylus tracking above laptop, keyboard as multitouch surface, and head-tracked screen-and-HMD 3D desktop, sort of laptop-nextgen for my own use... but didn't find a community left to motivate sharing or demos. :/ Thanks for your comment.
10 years ago there was a booming scene of open source natural user interface projects. People building huge multitouch interfaces, experimenting, releasing open SLAM tools, and exploring what you could do with DIY AR/VR/projection maping/natural feature tracking/gesture interfaces. Post the success of the first Oculus dev release all of the forums went quiet, the git repos started being unmaintained and outright scrubbed. The main contributors to the community got scooped up by the motherships and any supporting technologies locked down in what felt like about six months to a year. Leap Motion was a standout company from that time. They have been selling the exact product they built then with almost no improvement until recently. Somehow they weathered the storm, didn't sell, and are doing some really neat stuff now. Structure IO took up the stewardship of OpenNI and if you look hard enough you can still find cross platform installers that have the banned original kinect tech that Apple bought and is extremely litigious about keeping off the internet.