How to Setup a Leap Motion Controller 2 on Windows 10/11
I just got a “Leap Motion Controller 2” (that’s the official product name; I feel like “Leap Motion 2 Controller” would have been more natural-sounding) and I ran into a bit of problem setting it up. There was surprisingly very little documentation online about how to set it up, so I’m sharing this info to help the next person who tries to google for info on this.
The box came with surprisingly little. It was just the device itself (about the size of a very thick finger), a USB 3 Type-C cable, and a paper “Important Information Guide” that doesn’t really say anything important or useful. If that’s all that you found in your box too, then don’t worry, you’re probably not missing any components or anything.
Connect the device to your computer via a USB cable, e.g. the provided one, or you’ll need to buy your own USB Type-C to Type-A adapter cable or whatever if your computer only has Type-A ports. Ideally use a USB 3 cable, but a USB 2 cable will also work (more on that in a bit).
After a few moments, Windows will probably show the generic “USB device is ready to use” notification. This is not true, your device is not ready to use yet.
You need to download the proprietary Leap Motion software. You can get it at https://leap2.ultraleap.com/downloads/leap-motion-controller-2/ but you need to register an account to gain access to the downloads. So first, go to https://leap2.ultraleap.com/account-register/, register an account, check your e-mail, click the link in the activation e-mail, and then go to the download page, sign in, and download the software.
For Windows, you need to download either “Ultraleap Hyperion” or “Ultraleap Gemini”. I’m not entirely sure on the difference, and I only have direct experience with Hyperion—but supposedly if Hyperion doesn’t work for you, you can try Gemini instead. My understanding is that Hyperion is newer and has “more features”, but apparently those features are niche and rarely used, so Gemini is fine too.
When you install Hyperion, it’ll add a new icon in your Windows system tray. You’ll probably also see a bunch of notifications pop up.
Ideally, these notifications will say something like “Your device fully works” (paraphrased from memory), in which case great.
It’s possible that the notification will also say something like “We’ve detected you’re using a USB 2 cable. This will work, but you’ll get better tracking with a USB 3 cable” (paraphrased from memory).
You can right click on the icon in the system tray and choose “Open Control Panel”. Despite the name, this has nothing to do with the standard built-in Windows control panel. This will open a window that’ll hopefully say “device connected”, and if you wave your hands around in front of the device, you should see 3D-skeletal hands moving accordingly in the window. You might also see raw pixel footage data in that window too, depending on whether “Allow Images” is enabled in the settings (I think it’s enabled by default). This is probably the most reliable way to confirm that your Leap Motion device is working.
It’s possible that you’ll get a notification that says something like “Failed to activate license”. Apparently the Hyperion software, connects to Ultraleap’s servers and does some sort of license checking thing. If you get this problem, you can try the steps on Ultraleap’s official site at https://support.ultraleap.com/hc/en-us/articles/21392312141725-Hyperion-Failed-to-activate-license-error but this didn’t help me.
Instead, what I found helpful was to open their proprietary control panel, click on “Support & About” in the bottom right corner, and then “Show Logs” near the middle of the new view that pops up, but a little to the up and left. This will take you to the Windows folder where the logs are stored, which on my computer was C:\ProgramData\Ultraleap\HandTracker\Logs, where there’ll be a file tracker_log.txt. You can open the file in any text editor, and scan through it for error messages.
In my case, the relevant line said License server responded with HTTP code 400 - "invalid request", which indicated that the software was correctly contacting the remote server (i.e. it wasn’t an issue of my internet being down or something wrong with my firewall), but that the remote server was rejecting the request for some reason.
When I contacted support with this error, they told me it was a known issue on their side and they’re working on it. In the meantime, they recommended that I try using Gemini instead of Hyperion, because Gemini doesn’t perform the same license check. But then the next day, it looked like their server was fixed, and so I got everything working under Hyperion, so I never had the chance to try out Gemini.
Hopefully some of this info helps the next person who runs into any problems trying to set up their Leap Motion 2!