Leap Motion, the optical hand-tracking firm, was acquired by Bristol, UK-based haptics company Ultrahaptics earlier this year. Now, Ultrahaptics is relaunching under a new name created to reflect its shared heritage: Ultraleap.
Before the acquisition of Leap Motion and the subsequent rebranding, Ultrahaptics was best known for its mid-air haptic technology which uses ultrasound to project tactile sensations onto users’ hands.
According to a press statement provided to Road to VR, both the Ultrahaptics and Leap Motion names will continue to be maintained as trademarks for existing products, however all new software and hardware launches will fall under the Ultraleap name.
“Rebranding isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly. We’re immensely proud of what our companies have achieved,” explains Ultraleap CEO Steve Cliffe. “We’re also very excited for what’s to come. Our new name and brand reflects our ambitions in this new world, now and for the future.”
The company was, and still is, focused on using its technology across a variety of industries such as automotive, advertising, AR/VR, and simulation & training.
Notably, Ultraleap has licensed its technology to industry pros such as The Void’s Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at Disney, and has been showcased in concept cars developed by Harman, and Bosch.
The news of the rebranding was first reported by Business Leader.
Thanks to Antony Vitillo of VR/AR blog Skarred Ghost for pointing us to the news.
Leap Motion, the pioneer in optical hand-tracking, has been acquired by Ultrahaptics, the enterprise-focused immersive haptics company.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ultrahaptics reportedly acquired Leap Motion for approximately $30 million.
The company maintains in a company blog post that the acquisition won’t affect support for the Leap Motion community, and that “new and exciting products” are coming down the bend.
Since its founding in 2011, Leap Motion has garnered over $94 million in outside funding. The latest round, amounting to $50 million, arrived in summer 2017.
Its flagship product, Leap Motion, struggled at first to find purchase in the PC peripheral market, although it decidedly found a home in VR among Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2-clad developers, making it a household name at least in the burgeoning niche. At the time of this writing, a Leap Motion tracker can be purchased for under $80 new.
Image courtesy Leap Motion
It seemed Leap Motion was on a continuous upward trajectory, however it was reported late last year that Apple was actually on the verge of acquiring Leap Motion, but the deal fell through days before it was expected to close.
Undeterred, the company then went on to engineer its open-source AR headset, Project North Star. Leap Motion has since released plans for the headset, although it seems adoption among the dev community has been less than favorable.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Ultrahaptics will receive Leap Motion’s patents and hire most of its staff. CEO and co-founder Michael Buckwald will reportedly leave the company.
Leap Motion couches the acquisition as a “strategic deal,” which combines the two companies to create what they call a “vertically integrated technology company that brings us that much closer to fully immersive, rich and physically intuitive virtual interfaces.”
The marriage between the two companies makes a certain amount of sense, as Ultrahaptics produces enterprise-level haptic tech that’s based on ultrasonic emitters, which can serve up variable tactile sensations to a user in mid-air. Vertically integrating Leap Motion’s optical hand-tracking tech could push Ultrahaptics yet further down its path to becoming a bigger name in its target markets, including automotive, digital signage and location-based entertainment.
Ultrahaptics announced a “strategic deal” with hand tracking company Leap Motion to combine their startups and technologies.
The Wall Street Journal reports Ultrahaptics bought the company for around $10 million.
The combination of the two means Ultrahaptics will have tracking and haptic technologies to provide a sense of touch in certain types of products. Ultrahaptics “projects ultrasound-drive tactile sensations onto users’ hands” while Leap Motion tracks the movements of the fingers. Some location-based VR experiences, like The VOID, use this kind of hand tracking for impactful immersive effects. We’ll be curious to see if, Leap Motion combined with Ultrahaptics, we might see more ambient immersive effects integrated into various entertainment or education initiatives.
Leap Motion made an early impact in the developer and early adopter community with its USB-connected sensor which could provide hand tracking without the need for a handheld controller. Though it received many software upgrades over the years which improved performance and interaction quality, Leap Motion’s input approach never saw widespread adoption. Some head-mounted displays include USB ports which can connect to Leap Motion sensors for integrated hand tracking. The consolidation of the two companies makes some strategic sense as the first VR and AR headsets haven’t integrated either technology yet into the core of their platforms.
We’re also curious what this might mean for Project North Star. The open source AR headset effort backed by Leap Motion includes instructions on how to build a wide field of view AR device with integrated hand tracking. We’ll provide updates as we learn more.
Comments made by Oculus CTO John Carmack at Oculus Connect 5 and Twitter suggest that the upcoming Oculus Rift S cameras could support finger tracking.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean the software to do so would be ready by the time Rift S launches. But it does mean the headset could one day recieve the feature as a software update in future- the cameras are seemingly suitable.
Rift S Onboard Cameras
Rift S was first revealed in a TechCrunch report in October. The report revealed the headset would be an iterative update, increasing resolution and changing to the same inside-out tracking system as the upcoming Oculus Quest.
During 2018’s Oculus Connect 5 conference, Oculus CTO John Carmack briefly spoke about a project to bring finger tracking to Oculus Quest:
This seemed to suggest that the main limitation for finger tracking on the headset was the power & compute limitations of the mobile platform. He stated that Quest can be used as a platform to research finger tracking for future headsets with “the power and ability to do real time”.
The TechCrunch report and our findings suggest that Rift S will feature the same Insight cameras as Quest. So given the enormous relative power of a PC, shouldn’t Rift S be capable of finger tracking?
Carmack doubled down on stressing the power limitations of mobile as the main barrier. When asked about the featue in regards to PC, he confirmed it was possible. Requiring a reserved CPU core or two rules out this tech being usable in CPU-intensive apps. But it would be entirely possible for developers of apps suiting finger tracking to optimize for this limitation.
These comments aren’t indicative of the feature actually being available at launch- or ever. But what they do suggest is that the camera hardware is suitable and PCs are capable.
A Long Researched, Challenging Feature
The first indication of Facebook’s interest in finger tracking for VR was revealed in late 2014. The company acquired startup Nimble VR, composed of four veterans of hand tracking technology. But upon this acquisition, Oculus was clear that this tecnology “may not even be used in the CV2 or CV3”.
That’s likely because Nimble’s tech wasn’t just software, but a dedicated depth camera. Depth cameras deliver excellent finger tracking such as that found in the new HoloLens 2 AR headset. But the high end solutions are costly and the low end ones are bulky and relatively heavy, adding weight at the worst possible area of a headset (directly in front).
Delivering high quality finger tracking on regular cameras is an entirely different level of challenge. However, if it can be done it allows finger tracking to be added at no extra hardware cost to headsets which already use cameras for other tracking.
In 2016 at Oculus Connect 3, Chief Scientist Michael Abrash made a range of predictions about VR in the year 2021. He noted that finger tracking could be done perfectly with markers on gloves (and showed this off), but not yet directly. However, he predicted that by 2021, it would be possible:
