In May of last year I became aware of a new and, dare I say, revolutionary 3D gesture controller; the Leap Motion. After seeing the slick video, I knew I had to have one, how cool would it be to use this with QlikView?

Unfortunately, these units weren’t for sale yet. And to be honest, this looked like another cool gadget that gets hyped for two weeks before, for whatever reason, fading back into obscurity. Noticing Leap had a Developers Wanted page, I figured “why not” and signed up, not expecting to hear anything after that.

You can imagine my surprise when a few weeks ago I received an email from Leap saying they were ready to ship my developer kit. Today I arrived home to find the package from Leap had arrived!

I quickly hooked it up to my computer and played around with it for a bit. Overall, I must say that this controller probably works as advertised (the included example applications all work well). Unfortunately, a good mouse/touch driver is currently not yet available. I understand that one is available, but that it is being purposely held back by Leap so that developers focus on integrating the Leap controller into their software. It should be available when the device gets nearer to its consumer launch. Fair enough.

Fortunately, I found a third party mouse emulator and was able to take QlikView for a test drive. The video below shows the result.

As you can see, it’s not entirely accurate yet, but that will probably change once the native touch driver is released. The other thing I noticed is that this probably isn’t how you’ll want to work with QlikView for longer periods of time, “Gorilla arm” seems very likely. As an additional input method however, augmenting the regular mouse and keyboard with gestures, it could be quite useful.

The Leap Motion has a (still fairly limited) JavaScript library, in the near future I’ll probably be exploring the option of using this in a document extension to add gestures to the QlikView AJAX client. Stay tuned!