The Leap Motion controller was supposed to ship on May 19th according to the manufacturer who promised customers of delivery during the pre-orders phase via Best Buy retail store. However, on Thursday, April 25th, the CEO of Leap Motion, Michael Buckwald, said that they have delayed the shipping date of the 3D gesture controlled device from May 19th to July 22nd. Mentioning the reason behind the delay Buckwald said it was all about “living up to expectations.” He meant that the company need more time to test the Leap Motion controller. Buckwald added that, “There’s nothing catastrophically wrong, we’re very proud of the product…if we’d tried very hard we would have been able to ship the product [at the original time] but we wouldn’t have had the time to do the iteration and testing that we would want to do otherwise.”
As a result of this delay it appears that the CEO will now send the following letter to their customers, who had pre-ordered the 3D Motion controlled device on Thursday and respond to questions in a Google Hangout on Friday, April 26th. Here is the letter that Buckwald is said to be sending out to his customers:
“I wanted to reach out to update you on the status of our ship date. After a lot of consideration, we’ve decided to push back the date and will now be shipping units to pre-order customers on July 22nd.
This is not a decision we take lightly. There are hundreds of thousands of people in over 150 countries who have pre-ordered Leap devices, some as long as a year ago. These people are part of our community and there is nothing more important to us than getting them devices as quickly as possible.
We’ve made a lot of progress. When we first started taking orders back in May we were twelve (very tired) people in a basement. Now we are eighty (although still tired and possibly still in a basement). We’ve manufactured over six hundred thousand devices and delivered twelve thousand Leaps to amazing developers who are building applications that let people do things that just wouldn’t have been possible before. These developers have given us great feedback that we’ve used to make huge improvements to the stability and polish of the product. We’re really proud of Leap as both a company and a product.
The reality is we very likely could have hit the original ship date. But it wouldn’t have left time for comprehensive testing. This will come in the form of a beta test that will start in June. We will give the 12k developers who currently have Leap devices access to the feature complete product including OS interaction (today developers only have access to the SDK). We will also invite some people who are not developers to join the beta test.
Ultimately, the only way we felt 100% confident we could deliver a truly magical product that would do justice to this new form of interaction, was to push the date so we would have more time for a larger, more diverse beta test.
I really appreciate your patience. I know it’s been a long wait. Everyone that works at Leap is working tirelessly to make sure that wait is worth it. Thanks so much for your help and support.”
Photo: TNW
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