Leap’s Year

From helping you read your work email, to helping give you generous amounts of carpal tunnel, isn’t using a computer trackpad just great?

If you said no — you should’ve said no — then you’ll definitely be interested in this:

Introducing Leap Motion, the “mouse” that lets you use natural gestures to control your computer, just now available for pre-order.

Remember Tony Stark virtually refining his armor in “Iron Man,” or Tom Cruise mapping out crime scenes in thin air during “Minority Report”? This is where that starts.

Using a series of sensors and LEDS, the lighter-sized Leap (compatible with pretty much any laptop/desktop) tracks your finger gestures to 1/100th of a millimeter at 290 frames per second.

So now, with your hands, you can:

• Grab, twist, pinch, and turn objects on your screen
• Create and mold on-screen artwork and 3D models
• Play even more “Fruit Ninja”

That’s just a start. Given its nascent state, the Leap will potentially have thousands of apps available this year (thanks to $30 million in new funding and 12,000 active developers). Already, the Leap’s message boards are teeming with new ideas, from virtual keyboards, to protein engineering, to a game of Operation, a.k.a. “playing doctor.”

That’s probably less intimate than what you use your computer for now, anyway.