Hi guys,
I was very lucky and got a leap motion for Christmas. I have been dying to try it out on my flight simulator (Prepar3d 2.4), but am having some difficulties with figuring out the best way to utilise it and I was hoping that someone he has some experience they would like to share.
My first impulse was to use is as a simple mouse emulator. The concept is quite simple, you move your hand around over the sensor to control the mouse pointer on the screen. This approach has two drawbacks:
1. it is a bit imprecise and it quickly gets tiring to hold your hand in the air while figuring out the pointing.
2. The mouse emulation did not seem to work well with my P3D 2.4 installation, it refused to register any of my virtual mouse clicks.
Since this doesn't seem to work very well I'm thinking of two alternative approaches. The first is also quite intuitive, having the leap motion turn my game screen into a touchscreen by detecting when I place my finger on/near the screen and simulating a click. You could for instance use one finger for left click and two fingers for right click. However, I have not found any ready-made application to support this concept which I find a bit weird.
My third idea is a bit more flight simulator specific. Instead of using the screen as a touchscreen you could use any kind of flat area as a touch interface. I could for instance printout the overhead panel of a 737 and place the leap motion at the bottom of this. I could then map the depicted switch positions on the panel to float similar to controls, probably through FSUIPC. I could support new planes simply printing out new control interfaces and calibrating them. I have no idea how easy this would be, but assuming that their SDK is relatively easy to use, it should be no more difficult to do this than to do regular mouse emulation. The only additional step would be the FSUIPC which shouldn't be difficult.
I have quite some experience developing different pieces of software, but I have not had a look at the SDK for the leap motion yet. How difficult do you think it would be to implement something like my third idea? I realise that it is not revolutionary, in fact I have seen videos presenting similar stuff on YouTube, but I have not found any available application or source code examples to try it out myself.
I would be very grateful if anyone had some pointers to push me in the right direction, preferably using existing software, or failing that, where I should start to build my own. Maybe there are some open examples that I could build upon?
Merry Christmas.