The folks at Leap Motion revealed over the weekend that it’s about to start selling its keyboard featuring built-in gesture control as a standalone product. Up to now the keyboard could only be obtained through the purchase of certain HP desktop computers.
Leap Motion’s Kinect-like technology allows a user to perform a range of functions on their computer through in-air hand gestures and is currently available with the recently launched HP Envy 17 laptop as well as with a $75 standalone dongle.
The San Francisco-based company informed engadget at the Computex trade show in Taiwan that it’ll start selling the special keyboard some time this month for $99, with users able to hook it up to any PC running Windows 7 or 8.
As Leap Motion continues to oversee the steady expansion of its Airspace app store featuring software compatible with its technology, it’ll hope that offering the keyboard as a standalone product will help fuel more consumer interest in gesture-recognition tech, which could in turn push more developers into taking a closer look at the system.
As with its other products, Leap Motion’s specially designed keyboard allows users to perform a number of functions on their computer via various hand gestures. Able to track finger movements of “up to 1/100th of a millimeter,” a user can, for example, flip through photos on their display; browse the Web; draw and paint pictures; and mold and stretch 3D objects.
