Leap Motion’s tiny gesture controller lands exclusively at Best Buy

There’s still no official release date, but Leap Motion has already scored a major deal for its long-awaited gesture control gadget with Best Buy.

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The Leap Motion Controller will be available at Best Buy’s stores and website for $70 when it launches this spring, Leap announced this morning. Pre-orders will begin on Best Buy’s website in February, though you can also preorder via Leap’s website right now.

Leap’s device, which can track up to 10 fingers for Kinect-like motion controls, made a big splash when it debuted last year. The company says it can track movements smaller than a pin tip, and it can track your hands at fingers at up to 290 frames per second. Pretty impressive for a device about the size of a stick of gum.

“Finding a major retail partner for our North American launch was a critical component to our strategy, and Best Buy was the obvious choice,” Leap Motion President and chief operating officer Andy Miller said in a statement today.

As a fan of Microsoft’s Kinect motion controls, I’m hoping the Leap controller lives up to the hype. The company is aiming to replace the mouse with gesture controls, which could lead to some interesting developments on touch-focused operating systems like Windows 8.

Leap announced a major bundling deal with Asus back in December, which will see its controller included alongside certain Asus models, on top of an additional $30 million funding round. The company also plans to build an app store for gesture-controlled apps, and it has already sent out 12,000 test units to developers.

San Francisco, Calif.-based Leap has raised around $44 million in total from Highland Capital, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.