Leap Motion Delays Pre-Order Ship Date

Lance Ulanoff2013-04-25 19:54:50 UTC

You'll have to put aside those dreams of a Minority Report-style interface for just a bit longer. Leap Motion, the pint-sized technology that can turn an average desktop or laptop into a gesture-controlled computer, is not shipping to customers on May 13 as previously promised.

Now, those who ordered Leap Motion device early can expect them on July 22. In a letter to press on Thursday, Leap Motion co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald, said, "After a lot of consideration, we’ve decided to push back the date and will now be shipping units to pre-order customers on July 22nd. This is not a decision we take lightly.

“This is the first and only delay there will be. It's the right decision and will yield a beautiful product," Buckwald told Mashable.

Buckwald said that the now 80-person Leap Motion has already built and delivered thousands of devices to developers and probably could have made the original ship date. "But it wouldn’t have left time for comprehensive testing," wrote Buckwald. Leap Motion plans on completing testing in June.

“As a company we always said we would not release the product until it met our expectations and in this case our expectations are extremely high,” Buckwald said in an press conference following the announcement.

The company will also open up testing to some people outside the development community.

"This will come in the form of a beta test that will start in June. We will give the 12k developers who currently have Leap devices access to the feature complete product including OS interaction (today developers only have access to the SDK). We will also invite some people who are not developers to join the beta test."

Hardware will not be affected by the results of the beta testing. Leap Motion’s Buckwald said they have "600,000 units today in three different distribution center that we could ship today. It’s all on the software."

The delay comes just two months after leap Motion announced its pre-order delivery schedule and less than a month after it made a splash at SXSW 2013 in Austin, Texas. That was where Mashable got to test drive the rather remarkable computer interface technology.

Leap Motion and HP also recently announced their plan to embed the technology inside upcoming HP products.

Image courtesy of Leap Motion

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