When we first heard that we could use the Leap Motion we were excited. We felt, as a group, that it was important to try and learn something over the weekend and the Leap gave us exactly that opportunity. No one in the group had created anything that used motion sensing before so we thought it would be fun to use and learn. We thought about a few things on our trip to Tesco. Pottery, games and sign language were ideas that we talked about but we settled on sign language as we thought it would be fun and it was an idea with purpose.
Throughout the first 8 hours of the day we struggled with some of the features and realized more and more that using the 2 handed British Sign Language would make our lives more difficult as registering a hand that was above another was near impossible. We settled on the American Sign Language single hand. This made working on the project some what easier. The application is targeted mostly towards anyone with a hearing difficulty or people that want to learn to communicate with people that have impaired hearing.
The thing that the group is most proud of is that our application couldn't use the API alone to work out when hand and finger position matched the stored "image" of the hand. To counter this problem we used the API to get the finger position relative to the palm of the hand, did some maths to make the numbers that we took from the system applicable to more than one set of hands. We also had to think of a way to make the hand seem more steady, this meant that even with a bit of movement or being slightly off we could still recognize a hand position, we did this by consistently rounding the numbers we got to the nearest multiple of three. Although what we have currently got is not perfect it has been progressively improved throughout the weekend. We now have something that works pretty well.
Things we would like to explore are: using 2 leap motions to detect the hands from above and below to paint a more accurate picture; creating a nicer GUI to allow users to really enjoy using the system and maybe working on a speed test system with an international leader board.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.