The Leap Motion (at the time) was a new, highly unorthodox, and frankly very cool computing input device, released introduced to the world in the Fall of 2012. The company that produced the Leap Motion, Leap Motion, Inc., raised a few large funding rounds from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and others, and the future seemed promising. The company developed a device that enabled natural hand gesture input to a computer, using a system of LiDAR scanners set on top of a desk, in a sleek, cigarette box sized package. The best part was the Leap Motion SDK provided a dead-simple set of APIs, particularly for JavaScript.

I started programming when I joined the UW Hackers organization in my first quarter at the

University of Washington

A sidebar: After an incredible first meeting with UW Hackers featuring an introduction to Node.js by Karan Goel (and a typical College style hours-long dinner at the U-District MOD Pizza afterwards), friendships were forged, I was hooked, and started my journey into the world of Computer Science. While I worked on manyThe Leap Motion was an awesome conduit to channel my creative energy, and were the first set of larger projects I worked on during my initial learning journey.

FlappyLeapBird was my first attempt at a “complete” implementation of a game with the Leap Motion. It consisted of a patch to an existing browser implementation of the (then very popular) platform game Flappy Bird. I added logic to control the character with “flapping” hand motions, driven by input from the Leap Motion.

Surprisingly (as of November 2022), the website still works! If someone can still get their hands on a Leap Motion (they went bankrupt in 2019) and a copy of the SDK, presumably this would still work as intended!

Working with Grant Timmerman, we built LeapPong, a multiplayer pong game where you use your hands as paddles.

Using a socket.io backend for communication, two Node.js agents persisted a common game state and displayed a representation of two pong paddles and a “ball” that interacted with the edges. We implemented a (very basic) game physics engine, and rendered and manipulated all of the gameplay objects using jQuery. Reversing the direction of the game display for each of the players proved to be the most challenging piece of this.

This was my first collaborative programming project, and we got to present to the UW Hackers group in Winter Quarter 2014.