Ultraleap

Ultraleap
Information
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Hand tracking, Haptics, Extended reality
Founded	2019 (merger of Ultrahaptics and Leap Motion)
Founder	Tom Carter (Ultrahaptics), David Holz and Michael Buckwald (Leap Motion)
Headquarters	Bristol, United Kingdom
Notable Personnel	Tom Carter (Co-founder and CEO), Steve Cliffe (former CEO)
Products	Leap Motion Controller 2, Stereo IR 170, mid-air haptics modules, TouchFree, Gemini and Hyperion hand-tracking software
Parent	ROLI (from November 2025)
Website	https://www.ultraleap.com

Ultraleap is a British technology company based in Bristol, United Kingdom that develops optical hand tracking and mid-air ultrasound haptics. It was formed in 2019 when the UK haptics firm Ultrahaptics acquired the American hand-tracking company Leap Motion, and the combined business rebranded under the Ultraleap name in September of that year.

The company combined two complementary technologies for touchless three-dimensional interaction: Leap Motion's stereo infrared cameras, which track a user's bare hands in mid-air, and Ultrahaptics' phased ultrasonic transducer arrays, which project tactile sensations onto the skin without any wearable. Ultraleap supplied these technologies for virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, automotive in-car interfaces, and public interactive displays.

After the consumer XR market declined, Ultraleap cut its workforce in 2024 and again in early 2025, sold patents to the IP financing firm SIM IP, and on November 11, 2025 was acquired by the music technology company ROLI, with co-founder and chief executive Tom Carter becoming ROLI's chief technology officer. Its hand-tracking and gesture technology is now focused on music products rather than broad XR applications.

Predecessor companies

Leap Motion

Leap Motion was founded in 2010 in the San Francisco Bay Area by David Holz and Michael Buckwald, building on optical sensing research Holz began as a mathematics doctoral student. The company shipped its first product, the Leap Motion Controller, in July 2013. The small USB device used infrared cameras and LEDs to track the position of a user's hands and fingers in the space above it, allowing gesture control without touching a screen. Leap Motion later refocused the device toward Leap Motion VR, releasing mounts and software that let the controller be attached to the front of a VR headset for in-headset hand tracking.

Ultrahaptics

Ultrahaptics was a spin-out of the University of Bristol, founded in 2013 by Tom Carter based on ultrasound research he carried out during his PhD in the university's Department of Computer Science. The underlying technique was published in the paper "UltraHaptics: Multi-Point Mid-Air Haptic Feedback for Touch Surfaces," presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in St Andrews in October 2013. The method uses a phased array of ultrasonic transducers to focus acoustic radiation pressure at points in mid-air, creating touch sensations on a person's bare hands. Ultrahaptics raised a £35 million Series C round in December 2018 led by Mayfair Equity Partners, with earlier backing from IP Group.

Formation and rebrand

On May 30, 2019, Ultrahaptics acquired Leap Motion for a reported 30 million US dollars. On September 20, 2019 the two firms announced they would operate under a single new name, Ultraleap, headquartered in Bristol and led by Steve Cliffe, who had been chief executive of Ultrahaptics. The company described its combined offering as a full stack of hardware and software for spatial, three-dimensional interaction. The Ultrahaptics and Leap Motion names were retained as trademarks for existing products, while Ultraleap was used for new launches.

Technology

Hand tracking

Ultraleap's hand-tracking cameras use a pair of infrared cameras and illuminators to capture stereo images of the hands, from which software reconstructs a skeletal model of each hand and its joints in real time. The tracking is performed by a software engine that Ultraleap iterated across several generations; the fifth generation, Gemini, was released in 2021, and a later engine, Hyperion, added microgesture recognition, more robust tracking while holding objects, and selectable low-power and high-power modes alongside its regular mode. Both run on Windows, macOS, and Android and integrate with the Unity and Unreal Engine development tools.

Mid-air haptics

The mid-air haptics technology inherited from Ultrahaptics uses a grid of ultrasonic transducers to focus sound pressure at points in the air above the array, which a user feels as discrete points or shapes of touch on the hand. Because the effect needs no glove or controller, Ultraleap positioned it for touchless public kiosks, automotive controls paired with in-car heads-up displays, and XR. The hardware is typically deployed either as a flat "puck" on a surface that fires upward or mounted facing the hands, and the company released a Sensation Designer authoring tool for haptic effects at CES 2024. Co-founder Tom Carter said the company did not believe adding more wearable hardware was the right approach for most XR users, framing both hand tracking and mid-air haptics as ways to interact with three-dimensional content using only the bare hands.

Products

Product	Type	Notes
Leap Motion Controller	Hand-tracking camera	Original Leap Motion device, shipped July 2013; USB peripheral using infrared cameras for desktop and, later, VR hand tracking
Ultraleap Leap Motion Controller 2	Hand-tracking camera	Second-generation camera announced at AWE 2023 (June 1, 2023); smaller, wider field of view and lower power than the original
Stereo IR 170	Hand-tracking module	Embeddable camera module for integration into headsets and products, with a 170-degree field of view and tracking range from about 10 cm to 75 cm or more
Mid-air haptics modules	Haptic hardware	Ultrasonic transducer arrays projecting tactile feedback onto the bare hand, used in automotive, public displays, and XR
TouchFree	Software	Application that detects a hand in mid-air and maps it to an on-screen cursor, retrofitting existing touchscreens for touchless control

Leap Motion Controller 2

The Ultraleap Leap Motion Controller 2 was announced at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) on June 1, 2023, at a launch price of 139 US dollars, with global shipping starting that summer. Compared with the original controller it is about 30 percent smaller, has a roughly 19 percent wider field of view, and draws around 25 percent less power. The camera tracks 27 joints per hand within a 160-by-160-degree field of view, over a depth range from about 10 cm to 110 cm, at up to 120 frames per second, and connects over USB-C. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Android XR2 and can be mounted to headsets from manufacturers including HTC, Lenovo, Meta, Pico, and Varjo. From February 2025 the cameras shipped with a software license included.

Funding and restructuring

Across its history Ultraleap raised more than 200 million US dollars from investors including Tencent, IP Group, and British Patient Capital. The market for standalone XR headsets, many of which added their own built-in optical hand tracking, did not grow as the company had expected; AR and VR headset shipments fell sharply in 2024, and Ultraleap's accounts acknowledged that the AR/VR market had underperformed against expectations.

In June 2024 Ultraleap told staff it would roughly halve its workforce and proposed splitting the company in two: selling the hand-tracking (Leap Motion) business and spinning out the mid-air haptics division into a separate company owned by existing shareholders. The company had breached the terms of a 15 million pound loan. In early 2025 it laid off a further 30 employees, leaving around 24 staff, and its intellectual property was sold to the US IP financing firm SIM IP.

Acquisition by ROLI

On November 11, 2025, Ultraleap and the British music technology company ROLI announced that Ultraleap would join ROLI. Co-founder and chief executive Tom Carter became ROLI's chief technology officer and a member of its board. ROLI, founded in 2009 by Roland Lamb and known for the Seaboard keyboard and the MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) standard, already used Ultraleap's computer-vision tracking in its Airwave music platform. Lamb said the two teams would work together to apply gesture recognition and AI to music learning and creation, refocusing Ultraleap's hand-tracking technology from broad XR uses onto music products.