Leaping in to action

The Leap Motion Developer Portal was recently opened to the wider Development Community, and so it was time to see what those privileged few had been working on, with their early Development Kits, behind closed doors.

Browsing around on the Developer's forums, I came across a fascinating article by José Pereda which not only whet my appetite for the challenges which lay ahead, but emphasised that a lot of progress has been made with Java's UI platform, JavaFX, and that the Java port of Box2D looks awesome. I am completely unfamiliar with JavaFX and JBox2D, but I foresee myself using these libraries heavily in the future, so whilst I wait for my Leap Motion controller to be delivered, this seemed like a great time to get stuck in with learning these technologies.

In José Pereda's article, he reference Toni Epple's use of JavaFX and JBox2D to create a pinball machine as a very useful resource. Looking over what Toni has done, I was reminded of childhood memories of Space Cadet Pinball and it struck me as a good idea for a fun little project to learn all about UI design with JavaFX and to start learning how to program using the JBox2D physics engine. So that's what I'll be doing in the short term – slowly trying to build up to something that looks like Space Cadet Pinball, using JBox2D and JavaFX, but isn't as full featured.

When the Leap Motion controller finally arrives, I can work on replacing the keyboard controls for the flippers and spring launcher with the appropriate hand actions. 

Next (Getting started with JBox2D)