Mind-blowing technology, on sale now

Excuse me if I sound a little excited in this post.

But the Leap just blew my mind.

Check this out:

The Leap is a small box about the size of a flash drive that sits on your desk in front of your screen. Using infrared technology, it creates a virtual 3D space in front of you, in which you can begin to interact with your computer using your hands or even a pencil or pen.

Watch the video and you can see immediately the possible implications for real estate. Pinching, zooming, flicking and drawing on a map. It all seems to be largely effortless. It’s because it is a…

Natural User Interface (NUI)

“a user interface that is (1) effectively invisible, or becomes invisible with successive learned interactions, to its users, and (2) is based on nature or natural elements (i.e. physics, also known as Natural Philosophy).”

Wikipedia entry on Natural user interface

Interacting with objects using gestures is a natural part of human behavior in the real world – think about how we turn the pages of a magazine, circle properties on a map or trace a line with our fingers. We point to highlight or indicate our interest in something. We smile when we meet someone new.

All of these are learned interactions that become subconscious and “natural” over time.

Our smartphones and tablets have brought many of these gestures into the two-dimensional spaces of the multi-touch screens that sit in our pockets.

The Leap, and similarly, the Xbox Kinect, are bringing these paradigms into three-dimensional space. And to much bigger screens.

Put more bluntly, they are making the fictional worlds of Minority Report and Tony Stark’s Iron Man a reality.

That’s pretty cool, but…

The best is yet to come

Incredibly, the device isn’t even a concept. It is available for pre-order right now and will ship later this year. Better yet, it only costs $79.

In the meantime, the company is making a big push to bring in developers who are interested in building new applications that use the Leap’s NUI. If you are a developer who’s interested in working with their SDK, you can submit an application immediately.

I’d love to see some real estate developers dive into this and show us what we all know could be possible.

I’m ready to get blown away all over again.