Leap Motion: Gesture Control Takes a Shaky Step Forward

Ever since Tom Cruise played PreCrime piano with a gesture-based workstation in Minority Report back in 2002, motion control looked like a sure bet as the interface of the future. Although the movie is set in 2054, it only took four years for motion technology to go mainstream, thanks to the Nintendo Wii in 2006.

Of course, the Wii used a relatively crude handheld controller to read motion, a system Microsoft improved upon with the Xbox Kinect, which uses sensors to turn the user's entire body into a controller. The Kinect proved so popular that Microsoft opened up the device to Windows users, although it's gotten little traction there.