Leap Motion’s gesture control quest continues with the Leap Motion Controller 2

Leap Motion, which made hand-tracking systems for virtual and augmented reality headsets, is reportedly being acquired by haptics company UltraHaptics. The Wall Street Journal reported the news earlier today, saying that the San Francisco-based Leap Motion had agreed to sell for around $30 million.

That’s a fraction of Leap Motion’s $306 million valuation at the peak of its hype in 2013. But it’s similar to a figure that Apple supposedly discussed during a never-completed acquisition last year. The Journal reports that UltraHaptics will get Leap Motion’s patents and hire most of its staff, with the exception of CEO and co-founder Michael Buckwald, who will reportedly leave the company.

Gesture interface company Leap Motion is announcing an ambitious, but still very early, plan for an augmented reality platform based on its hand tracking system. The system is called Project North Star, and it includes a design for a headset that Leap Motion claims costs less than $100 at large-scale production. The headset would be equipped with a Leap Motion sensor, so users could precisely manipulate objects with their hands — something the company has previously offered for desktop and VR displays.

Project North Star isn’t a new consumer headset, nor will Leap Motion be selling a version to developers at this point. Instead, the company is releasing the necessary hardware specifications and software under an open source license next week. “We hope that these designs will inspire a new generation of experimental AR systems that will shift the conversation from what an AR system should look like, to what an AR experience should feel like,” the company writes.

Qualcomm is launching an accelerator program for VR headset manufacturers, releasing a new headset reference design, and partnering with hand tracking company Leap Motion. The company is looking to kickstart production of headsets with features not found in the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, including an all-in-one wireless design that removes the need for wires or external tracking devices. This continues a mission it first announced last year, but with updated hardware and a goal of making it easier to build off Qualcomm’s work.

The virtual reality development kit, as Qualcomm calls it, is a self-contained design built on the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip. It has a 2560 x 1440 screen (equivalent to the Gear VR), 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of flash memory. There are also cameras both inside and outside the headset. On the inside, they enable eye tracking, a sometimes-gimmicky feature that can also make it easier to push high-quality graphics inside a headset. On the outside, they allow for inside-out (or “six degree of freedom”) tracking, which means people can experience moving around in VR without needing a specially assembled “VR room.” The deal with Leap Motion, probably the most advanced independent hand tracking company, also puts an exciting new interface on the table.

If you’ve ever used the Leap Motion hand tracker, you’ll know that it’s a magical experience punctuated by moments so frustrating it makes you want to throw things — except that you can’t pick them up, which is why you’re frustrated in the first place. Leap Motion is well aware of this problem, and the company has just announced a beta of what it calls the Interaction Engine, which is meant to fix it.

The Interaction Engine is an add-on for the larger Unity game engine, which supports just about any VR headset. It modifies the default physics rules to create more natural interactions with players’ in-game hands, including touching, picking up, and throwing objects. On a very broad level, objects without the Interaction Engine want to bounce away from each other when they collide, even if that collision is between your virtual fingers and the item they’re trying to grab. With the Interaction Engine, they’ll theoretically stick to your hand better, and you’ll be able to do things like stack them more easily. There are also custom physics settings for throwing items, and if you try to push objects in a direction they can’t move — like against the floor — they’ll phase through your hands, instead of trying to (as Leap Motion puts it) “violently escape.”

When Leap Motion was announced in 2012, it seemed like a solution looking for a problem. A little black box that plugged into a computer, it could recognize hand gestures and translate them into interface commands — to let you “do things on your computer just like you do them in real life.” But the company was trying to sell people on something they’d never asked for, for use with a machine they’d already been interacting with for years.

Then came virtual reality. When people first started using headsets like the Oculus Rift, the mouse and keyboard suddenly became inadequate: they were tough to find while effectively blindfolded, and they didn’t take advantage of VR’s unique feeling of 3D space. Suddenly, tools like Leap Motion started to make a lot more sense.

A high-profile VR headset is about to get its own motion control setup — and no, it’s not the Oculus Rift. Today, Leap Motion announced that it would be adding its hand-tracking technology to the OSVR Hacker Development Kit, a piece of open source hardware that will be released this summer. The Leap Motion, originally released as a non-VR gesture interface, has become one of the most common virtual reality controllers. OSVR is a partnership between various VR and gaming companies, but it’s better known for its headset, a rougher, cheaper, and more modular alternative to the Oculus Rift development kit.

OSVR will begin taking pre-orders in May, with the headsets shipping in June. Now, though, it will offer an optional Leap Motion faceplate that snaps across the front. This is fundamentally a more sophisticated version of a mount that Leap Motion released last year — one that’s been smoothed out and redesigned for a single product. We don’t know how much it will cost, but the OSVR headset will sell for $199, and a standalone Leap Motion is currently $79 (plus another $19 for a mount.)

One of the best features of VR headsets also happens to be one of its greatest shortcomings. Headsets are designed so that you can’t see anything else, making games incredibly immersive. Yet it also means that interacting with the real world requires removing it from your head. Not doing so brings the risk of knocking things over, including yourself. San Francisco-based Leap Motion has come up with a solution: you attach its $79.99 infrared camera sensor to the front of your headset, and use software to display live video of the real world right in the mask. Even better, you can do it without fully leaving whatever game or virtual experience you’re in, opening the door to new augmented realities.

If you’ve been looking to play around with Leap Motion’s innovative gesture control technology on your Windows PC but you hate the idea of plugging in a dongle, you’ll be glad to hear that HP has decided to start directly selling its keyboard with the technology built in. Leap Motion representatives at the Computex trade show reportedly tell Engadget that the keyboard will go on sale this month for $99, which puts it at $25 more than the dongle itself. That will probably be a hard sell, especially since — in our testing — Leap remains a novelty, not a tool. But it’s a significant move for Leap, as it gives the company another way to get its motion controls into homes. Previously, the keyboard was only available with select HP desktops. HP also sells a laptop with the technology built in.