Leap Motion, the hotly-anticipated “Kinect for computers” motion control device, will start shipping to consumers on May 13 and will be available for purchase at Best Buy retail locations on May 19, the company announced this morning.
If you haven’t already pre-ordered, however, the price is now a little higher: $79.99, up $10 from the pre-order cost.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have joined Leap Motion’s global community,” CEO Michael Buckwald said in a statement.
That’s a lot of devices to ship, and the company will start in sequence: People who ordered first will get their products shipped first.
In addition, the Leap Motion app store now has a name, and still no release date but at least a general timeline. COO Andy Miller told me yesterday that the company’s app store will be known as Airspace, and that it will be opening in the very near future. Fifty-two thousand developers have applied for Leap Motion developer kits, and 12,000 have already been sent out.
“We’ll be opening our app store for submissions very soon,” Miller said. “People are submitting apps already, even before it’s open.”
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Those apps include Disney’s Sugar Rush, a racing game from the Wreck-it Ralph movie, a paint-in-the-air app from Corel, and a “devil-stick two-hand music beat app” from well-regarded game studio Double Fine called Dischord, which will enable users to make music in space.
“There’s a whole new world of interesting apps out there letting you do things you couldn’t ever do before,” Miller said, adding that innovation beyond what is possible with a mouse and keyboard is part of Leap Motion’s criteria for allowing apps into Airspace. “I don’t think Airspace will be hundreds of thousands of apps, ever. It’s curated, and if an app doesn’t meet our standards, it won’t go in.”
One more app that announced its upcoming availability is Clear, the Mac to-do list. Here’s a quick video from RealMac, the company behind the software, showing what it can do:
Leap Motion says its hardware and software is up to 200 times more sensitive than existing motion-control technology and can track the movement of all 10 of your fingers in increments as small as 1/100th of a millimeter at up to 290 frames per second.
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