Leap Motion, a small device that adds 3D motion control to laptops and desktops, will start shipping on May 13 to those who pre-ordered. That’s a little bit later than the Q1 release date that Leap had previously announced. Michael Buckwald, CEO of Leap Motion, said in an interview that the company needed the extra time to scale up its manufacturing, get units to developers and give them time to build apps for the motion controller. “It’s a situation where we want to make sure that we live up to everyone’s hopes and dreams about the device, and I think in this case it’s the right call,” Buckwald said. Online orders will ship in the order that they’ve been received. You can still order a Leap online, but the price is now $80, up from its early pre-order price of $70. Best Buy, which has also promised to sell Leap in its retail stores, will begin stocking the device on May 19. Leap got a decent amount of buzz last May, when it announced itself as being 200 times more accurate than any other motion controller on the market. The device–roughly the size of two fingers held together–sits on a desk, and creates an area of eight cubic feet to detect hands and fingers. It runs on Windows 7 and 8, and Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8. Leap Motion I briefly tried the Leap at CES in January, and found that it was accurate enough to detect tiny movements in my fingers. But at the time, Leap didn’t have many apps that it was ready to show. Along with today’s shipping news, the company announced its own app store, called Airspace, with apps from Autodesk, Corel and The Weather Channel, among others. Games will include Cut the Rope from Zeptolab, Dischord from DoubleFine and Wreck-It Ralph: Sugar Rush Speedway from Disney. Leap doesn’t consider its app store to be a big money-maker, and in fact the company has no problem with developers taking their Leap-supported apps elsewhere. That’ll be … Continue reading Leap Motion Pushes Ship Date to May 13, Announces App Store