The Leap Motion release date has been pushed back to July 22 to allow additional time for beta testing. Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald has stated that the company would have been able to meet the original release date, but it would have had to sacrifice necessary testing.
"As a company, in good conscience, we couldn't sacrifice the testing process," Chief Executive Michael Buckwald said Thursday during a call with reporters. "We have to push back the date ... We really believe in meeting our own expectations and I think a little additional testing is necessary to get there."
According to the LA Times, the delay isn't the result of any technical issues with the hardware. Instead, the additional time will be used primarily for beta-testing the software. Buckwald has said that this is the first and will be the only release date delay for the product.
Leap Motion started out in 2010 and was running under the radar until publically announcing its motion controller on May 21, 2012. Despite the release date delay, Leap Motion says it has already built more than 600,000 units.
The Leap Motion controller is a 3-D gesture recognition device that took SXSW by storm earlier this year. If you're wondering how it differentiates from Microsoft's Kinect, Buckwald has a fairly simple explanation:
"Kinect is a fantastic device for dancing games, but it's hundreds of times less accurate than this technology and not capable of tracking fingers, so it's not a very developer-friendly platform for right now. And we want to provide a way for those developers to use a technology that will let them build applications that are much more complex, much richer, and much easier for consumers, as well as those high-end users to use so that they can do more powerful things."
