Qualcomm and Leap Motion have announced that they are partnering, bringing the advantage of bare hands interaction to VR worlds.
There's a lot happening in VR at the moment and on the cusp of Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference, there's a lot of talk about VR coming from Qualcomm. A big part of this comes from the company pushing its new Snapdragon 835 chipset as a natural choice for standalone VR headsets.
VR is only as good as the interaction, however. The days of being a static observer in a virtual world are gone and the pairing with Leap Motion is designed to bring natural user interaction with worlds, using bare hands, rather than having to rely on a controller, tracked gloves or other hand-held devices.
Leap Motion has been in the hand-tracking game for some time, demonstrating and integrating the technology into a number of different devices, allowing you to use your hands to manipulate content. That translates naturally into a VR world where you're fully immersed so this pairing makes plenty of sense.
We've seen Leap Motion working with tethered VR headsets before - like HTC Vive - however Qualcomm's VR vision is slightly different. Qualcomm's approach is to provide an untethered solution, rather than being connected to a super computer in a room full of sensors.
"Technology works best when technology disappears," said David Holz, chief technology officer at Leap Motion.
"Untethered, mobile VR headsets with intuitive, hand-based interaction and position tracking bring a level of quality, immersion, and accessibility to VR unlike anything that's been seen before."
We'll be looking to get our bare hands on this new VR experience at Mobile World Congress, so stay tuned for more information.