Leap Motion’s hyper-accurate hand-tracking VR tech shines in new Orion demo

One of the first things people do when they put on a virtual reality headset is try to look down at their hands. One company has the technology to ensure that you’ll actually see them.

Leap Motion has released a new video to show the capabilities of its Orion hand-tracking technology for virtual reality. In this clip, we see someone drawing in VR using only their hands an input device. As a way of demonstrating the accuracy of Orion, the video shows how pinching your fingers together activates the 3D paint. This will enable a lot more freedom than a gamepad or even the new motion-based Oculus Touch or HTC Vive controllers. Leap Motion is also using this as its entry into a virtual and augmented reality business that tech advisor Digi-Capital think could generate as much as $120 billion by 2020.

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To get to that level of spending, VR will have to attract mainstream consumers, and hand-tracking technology could do exactly that. While many people find controllers and keyboards confusing and a barrier to gaming and other apps, Leap Motion enables those people to jump right into VR with the hands that they are already accustomed to.

Orion is both a software and hardware solution. The company has released the updated tracking software to work with the Leap Motion Controller camera that is already on the market, but it is also says that it is partnering with other companies in the space to Orion-specific hardware into new VR devices.

Check out the demonstration in the video below to see what that technology would enable you to do:

Leap Motion released its “controller” in 2015 as a way to do motion input on a PC, but the company has always thought about what this could do for VR. Now, with the Rift shipping later this month and HTC’s Vive shipping in April, Leap Motion sees an opportunity to pounce on a market that hasn’t settled on a control standard yet.