No-one cares about input only.
People care about output. They care about what they can see.
Keiichi Matsuda (creator of Hyper Reality) displayed these controls by "Introducing Virtual Wearables*" on his twitter @keiichiban last month. They looked cool. Or beautiful. Both visually beautiful and functionally beautiful. Intuitive and natural.
But we know this is Leap Motion's strength.
You can see the hand without AR in between the nose pad of the galsses
The question was "What is HMD it running on?" What digital eyewear were they using? What was the output running on?
Apparently it is Leap Motion's own head mounted display, the North Star.
image by Leap Motion. Source: RoadtoVR
Now people will care about Leap Motion and what gesture recognition means as the future of input and HCI.
No one cared about gesture recognition before FPV AR output. No one really noticed the value of the mouse until it was attached to a beautiful GUI. At Xerox PARC, they might as well have thrown a rat on the table as described in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.
The past decade of computing has largely been defined by mobile phones. There were new capabilities when users could take a connected device with them. The information on a mobile site or mobile app was contextually relevant. But the input pattern was multi-touch. And multi-touch defined
There were some fun experience that required users to shake the phone as a specific, and often secondary method, of input. But we were largely designing for an interface that only simulated two scenarios in real life: 1. Drawing a note on a dusty car window. 2. finger painting.
These experiences all lacked finger grain input beyond zooming in. The methods of hand movement, grips, and other finger articulations that we use every day were not applicable. With Augmented Reality offering an interface that is contextually relevant, the input methods are beyond multi-touch and offer the chance for a much more natural or supernatural user interface.
Read more:
http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/
https://www.roadtovr.com/leap-motion-reveals-project-north-star-an-open-source-wide-fov-ar-headset-dev-kit/?platform=hootsuite
Digital eyewear is the new black.
Again. And this time it will begin to stick.
* Magic Leap patent documents display virtual wearables as "Charms."
[ But now with two HMD/Digital Eyewear companies, this will continue to confuse people between Leap Motion and Magic Leap :P ]