HP ENVY17 Leap Motion SE First To Market With Embedded Micro Sensor

This week the folks at Leap Motion have made clear their intention to dive ever-deeper into the world of high-powered electronics, hitting a real-deal HP notebook here for starters. This is the first of what may be a series of HP/Leap Motion connections, given their announcement of co-development earlier this year. This is the HP ENVY17 Leap Motion Special Edition notebook, complete with Leap Motion's own 3D motion control technology embedded into the very hardware.

All the way back on the first day of 2011, SlashGear reviewed an iteration of the notebook Leap Motion will be appearing in soon, back when a 3D-capable display was all the rage. This device was the HP ENVY17, otherwise known as the HP ENVY 17 3D. Even with the passing of more than two years since we had our first experience with that beast of a notebook, it still appears to be trucking. Of course there have been a select few upgrades since the top-tier technology of the day over the past couple of years, the full collection of which you'll want to have a peek at when you're dropping dollars (right around $1049.99, to be precise), at HP online.

Today we're concentrating on the unique bit of hardware under this notebook's hood. This notebook is known as the HP ENVY17 Leap Motion SE (Special Edition), and will be the first to work with a new Leap Motion "micro sensor." This micro sensor comes in at a height of 3.5mm and earns the honor of what Leap Motion suggests as being "smaller than any 3D motion control technology on the market."

Leap Motion makes a point to mention that while this sensor is less than half the height of the standalone Leap Motion Controller device, it works with "the same power and precision." You'll find this micro sensor embedded on the surface of the notebook, just under the right side of the keyboard in that wide open space you'd otherwise be wresting your wrist in for tapping on this unit's number pad.

For those of you that've never seen Leap Motion (pictured above) in action, have a peek at our first full Leap Motion review from earlier this year.

This HP notebook will be coming in with Leap Motion's Airspace app platform (their app store, in other words) containing such winners at GameWAVE. The app known as GameWAVE allows gamers to hit their favorite titles by retro-fitting 3D motion gestures to actions in-game. This is quite similar to mapping controls to a Bluetooth controller, for instance, and works with a vast variety of top-level releases from the past several years (as well as classics, of course).

HP ENVY17 Leap Motion SE will be released in the "next few weeks" – that's as specific as this machine's drop gets for the moment. Stay tuned as we watch this Leap Motion micro sensor appear in other hardware too, soon!