Of course you all remember the Leap Motion Controller, which allows PC and Mac users to control their devices by waving their hands and fingers in front of them. It's ability to mimic our exact movements has made it more popular than Microsoft's Kinect sensors, which involved pinching, swiping, waving, and grabbing thin air (think less Fruit Ninja, more Jenga). Leap Motion is simple, and also a very portable device. It has also continued to improve the software on its gesture-based controller with more accurate and responsive hand tracking. Now, with all the hype surrounding the virtual reality market, the company has used these improvements to propel itself straight into VR. This week, it announced its very own VR Developer Mount for its existing Leap Motion Controller, in hopes of it eventually getting into the hands of serious VR headset makers (Oculus).

Rather than sticking to keyboard and mouse controller input, Leap Motion unveiled new hardware and software updates that will allow the motion controller to be in-line with your eyes, picking up everything in your field-of-view. The controller tracks your hand movements so you can interact with your computer without ever touching a keyboard, mouse, or computer screen. Remember, this isn't a headset itself, rather an inexpensive mount that attaches to your existing VR headset.

Think of it as having additional viewing pleasure. You usually see what is within the headset's display, but now you also see the people and objects within your field-of-view. "As a rule, anything you're looking at, you'll be able to interact with," said Leap Motion CEO and co-founder Michael Buckwald. In addition, its hardware, which consists of a sensor with two high-resolution, high-speed color cameras, makes viewing the world a lot closer to human vision (original Leap was limited to infrared).

“With next-generation ‘mega-sensors’ like this, a Leap Motion device can literally become your eyes into the digital and physical realms – allowing you to seamlessly mix and mash, fade and blend, between virtual environments and the sharpness of the real world,” David Holz, co-founder and CTO of Leap Motion said.

Leap Motion's recently-released raw image API opens up access to the raw infrared images captured by the controller's sensors. It sees what you see by expanding the tracking space to be in any direction you are facing. Another update will include a new top-down tracking mode so the controller can track movements when the sensor is pointed down, like being mounted on a heads up display. Until now, Leap Motion could only track hand movements when the sensor was facing up (bottom-up tracking).

Although the Leap Motion controller has been tested by developers with VR headsets, the two haven't worked well together until now. The problem was keeping the controller in a fixed position without limiting the user's range of motion. The VR Developer Mount, which the company is rumored to call “Dragonfly”, is a logical evolution; something that has been in the works for a long time. The module opens up unlimited possibilities for developers to blend the virtual world with the physical. Perhaps we will soon be seeing companies like Sony, Oculus, and Samsung buying in to Leap's idea. The mount is available now for $19.99, along with a download of the V2 Beta version of Leap Motion's SDK.