Leap Motion coming to tablets

The company's CEO has revealed that the first mobile devices to support the gesture-recognition technology will be hitting the shelves before the end of 2014.

The company's CEO has revealed that the first mobile devices to support the gesture-recognition technology will be hitting the shelves before the end of 2014.

It will mean that users will no longer need to actually touch their tablets in order to control them. Leap Motion's technology is able to recognize individual finger movements within an eight cubic feet space and respond accordingly. So a wave of one hand could skip a track on a music playlist, while pointing upwards would turn up the volume.

The technology is already available as a standalone Controller which plugs into a PC via its USB port, costs just $79.99, and makes users feel like Tom Cruise in 'Minority Report.' The device, no bigger than a USB Flash drive, works with a growing number of custom apps that offer everything from playing air guitar to sketching and design applications, and the number of apps and developers being attracted to the platform is growing all the time.

What's more, the technology is already integrated as standard into a growing number of HP desktop computers and Leap Motion has also signed similar partnership deals with a number of other PC manufacturers including ASUS.

Speaking in London on Tuesday, Michael Buckwald, the company's CEO and co-founder also revealed that tablets are just the first step. The company hopes to integrate the technology into cars, phones and TVs and that the next software update to the existing system will be coming in January 2014.