为什么手指永远取代不了鼠标

    我中枪了。我在桌子上朝空气又抓又砸又戳地比划了八秒钟，弗兰克•威尔提终于掏出手枪把我干掉了。幸好这只是一场游戏，但是我却连一点取胜的机会都没有。我的枪——在这场游戏中就是我的食指，一整天都没有击中任何东西。

    这款射击游戏Fast Iron》只是最近上市的Leap Motion体感控制器的众多游戏应用里的一款。Leap Motion是一种可以让用户通过手势控制电脑的外围设备.2012年5月，它刚刚发布的时候，的确带给人很多期待。现在一年多过去了，这款79美元的设备也终于正式投放市场。试用一周之后，以它目前的情况看，这种体感控制技术倒是说不出有什么问题。

    安装Leap Motion体感控制器的过程出乎意料地简单。我还以为必须得把这个体感控制器放在离屏幕一定距离的地方才行，要么就是必须得把这款设备放在一定的高度上，但事实证明这些都没必要。而且也不必下载额外的软件，算是一款即插即玩型的设备，我通过一个USB接口就把它连接到了我的Mac上。

    安装Leap Motion的软件也没什么难度，而且给人的感觉就是手势控制似乎很好掌握，似乎传感器可以很清楚地捕捉每个手指的运动。但是软件的完善程度很不够，让我大跌眼镜——在我的Mac上运行的时候，它的全屏功能自行调节了所有其它应用窗口的大小，这一点非常讨厌。而且图像也不太稳定，感觉就像分辨率很低一样。想到这里，我心烦地摆了摆手，但是这款设备却没有探测到这个动作。事后来看，这说明它灵敏度欠缺。这个缺点可能会影响我对这款体感控制器的体验。

    比如说，就在我选择能与这款设备兼容的软件的时候，我发现图像效果不佳反倒成了这款设备最小的问题。这款设备有一个专门的Airspace Store网络商城，主要销售各种第三方开发者针对这款设备开发的软件。其中有免费的也有付费的，既可用于苹果的Mac，也可用于普通PC。它们大部分是游戏，但也有一些学习和工作软件，表明了Leap Motion体感控制器能够用于哪些用途。

    我尝试的第一个软件叫Swoosh。在打开这个程序之后，我的电脑完全乱套了，就好像我在用Leap Motion打太极一样。与此同时，我的iTunes突然神秘地开始播放我的影音库里的第一个电影【如果你一定想知道是什么电影的话，告诉你吧，是《王牌播音员》（Anchorman）】。然后Swoosh 的音乐也响了起来。我每次在Swoosh上打开一个第三方影音文件都会出现这种问题。后来我才明白问题出在哪。Swoosh是一款DJ应用，可以播放用户的iTunes里的音乐，用户可以用手势“转唱片”、“打碟”。但在我搞懂这个问题之前又出现了另一个问题，那就是找不到这款应用的全屏窗口了，它不知道为什么被最小化了。后来我终于成功地把影音库里的一首歌导到了这款软件里，但是它对我的手势要么毫无反应，要么就是给出让人意外的反应。我没办法，只好举手投降。

    He shot me. After a good eight seconds of flailing, grabbing, and poking at the air above my desk, Frank Welty finally unholstered his sidearm and put me out of my misery. Alas, it was only a game, but I never really stood a chance. My shooter, which in this case was my pointer finger, hadn't hit a damn thing all day.

    The game, Fast Iron, is just one of dozens of apps available for the newly launched Leap Motion Controller. A peripheral that lets users control their computer through hand gestures, this device showed plenty of promise when it was announced in May 2012. Now, more than a year later, the $79 product has come to market, and after a week of feeling it out, it's hard to point a finger at what exactly is wrong with gesture-based computing, at least in its current state.

    Setting up the Leap Motion Controller was unexpectedly easy. I had imagined having to input measurements like the controller's distance to the screen, or heeding requirements like keeping the device at a certain height, but none of that was necessary. Other than downloading a software suite, the peripheral was more-or-less plug-and-play, the unit powered and connected to my Mac via a USB cable.

    The Leap Motion software involved minimal hand-holding, and gave the impression that gesture-based controls would be easy to master, with the sensor seeming to pick up each finger and hand rotation cleanly. But the program's lack of finish caught my eye -- running on my Mac, the software's full-screen capability resized all my other applications windows (a huge annoyance), and its graphics looked choppy, almost like they were low-resolution. The device couldn't detect my hands shaking with worry over these concerns, but in hindsight, they were clear indicators of a lack of finish that would plague my experience with the controller.

    For example, as I continued pawing through the device's compatible software, poor graphics soon became the least of Leap Motion's problems. The company's Airspace Store, a proprietary app marketplace that sells third-party created software for the device, offers users a mix of free and paid apps for both Macs and PCs. The selection is mostly games, but there are learning and productivity titles already in the mix that show the range of what the Leap Motion Controller can do.

    The first app I tried out was Swoosh. Upon launching the program, my computer totally freaked out, as if I was using the Leap to shadow box. At the same time, iTunes mysteriously launched and started playing the first movie file in my library (Anchorman, if you must know), blasting Swoosh's music over the video. This happened every time I launched the third-party title, until finally I figured out the problem. Swoosh is a deejaying app that plays music from your iTunes library, and users can "spin" and "scratch" the tracks like a record with the Leap Motion Controller. I only discovered this after locating the app's missing full-screen window, which for some unknown reason had been minimized. And when I finally loaded a song from my library into the software, the controls were unresponsive and unpredictable. I couldn't do much of anything with it, except for throw my hands up and walk away.