The motion-controlled, hover-hands future isn't quite here yet, but we've used a Leap Motion and we can tell you first hand that it's damned awesome. But what's inside that little box of magic? A developer at SparkFun electronics dove inside to find out. The guts are surprisingly modest.
Inside the tiny box's brushed-aluminum shell sit a pair of circular CMOS sensors that gaze out like a pair of googly eyes, both required for the device's stereoscopic vision; it fails if you cover one up. But otherwise, the gadget's innards suggest that almost all of the heavy lifting is being done on the PC side, with software. The Leap Motion itself if just watching your hands intently and sending all that data over to the computer as fast as it possibly can.
The little box with eyes will be hitting store shelves on July 29th for $80, or in your mailbox July 22nd if you pre-ordered. And that's when we'll get a chance to really dig in deep and see what kind of tricks the software side of this sucker can pull off. You can hop over to SparkFun to learn more about the nitty-gritty details. [SparkFun]