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Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

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Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#51

Post by nightski »

flexie wrote: post #29
jrkelly wrote: post #17

Seems clear he is doing this to increase his personal brand as the "real life tony stark" as opposed to it actually being useful for engineering. His personal brand is an enormous asset on the balance sheet of his companies, so I really respect this - but lets call it what it is.

Of course this will be useful for engineering. Maybe not in it's current state but in future, better versions. He and his team are trying out some really cool ideas. While most of us work on apps that involve displaying text and pictures, this guy has the good fortune to be able to play with rockets and cars etc. Good for the World that not everybody is working on another app.

Well, yea except it builds heavily on what others are doing, yet articles like this sensationalize it and act like he invented it himself. Take the LEAP motion for example. That is a major component that he had no involvement in.

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#52

Post by 6d0debc071 »

flexie wrote: post #29
jrkelly wrote: post #17

Seems clear he is doing this to increase his personal brand as the "real life tony stark" as opposed to it actually being useful for engineering. His personal brand is an enormous asset on the balance sheet of his companies, so I really respect this - but lets call it what it is.

Of course this will be useful for engineering. Maybe not in it's current state but in future, better versions. He and his team are trying out some really cool ideas. While most of us work on apps that involve displaying text and pictures, this guy has the good fortune to be able to play with rockets and cars etc. Good for the World that not everybody is working on another app.

Mice already let you do everything he's doing there, just as easily and with more precision. And most 3d modelling programs still provide a standard setup of orthographic views. Modelling in perspective is really difficult and inexact. It doesn't matter how you're interacting with it, perspective is just a bad way to deal with complexity and precision at the same time.

If you look at things like z-brush, that are modelling for things where precision isn't as important, generally organic/character modelling, they do tend to work better in perspective and come up set up that way by default. But anything that needs precision, which engineering does...

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#53

Post by TomAnthony »

grannyg00se wrote: post #44

What are the glasses shown at 2:07? They look somewhat like meta's spaceglasses but too dark. I'd be interested to know if there is another player in that market.

I think they are just 3d glasses like you get at the cinema.

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#54

Post by swamp40 »

The best critique I've heard of the Leap interface is that human hands are extremely proficient at manipulating small physical objects.

But without any kind of force feedback, manipulating images using the Leap is neither simple nor easy.

You must become like a good mime, and that takes a lot of practice and is very counter-intuitive.

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#55

Post by 6d0debc071 »

farmdawgnation wrote: post #48
jrkelly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Good for the World that not everybody is working on another app. Couldn't agree more with that. I'm just explaining the reason you are seeing this is primarily for PR purposes -- which is a huge part of his job. HN should be able to tell the difference between good PR and good tech.

Why do good PR and good tech have to be mutually exclusive? Especially in a community such as Hacker News, shouldn't they be the same thing, in a way?

Rating systems are going to tend towards the median understanding. If you're doing something that requires specific knowledge to appreciate, then you're going to be inherently penalised by being in competition with the projects that are cool and everyone can appreciate - regardless of the comparative utility of your posts.

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#56

Post by kvnn »

nightski wrote: post #51
flexie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this will be useful for engineering. Maybe not in it's current state but in future, better versions. He and his team are trying out some really cool ideas. While most of us work on apps that involve displaying text and pictures, this guy has the good fortune to be able to play with rockets and cars etc. Good for the World that not everybody is working on another app.

Well, yea except it builds heavily on what others are doing, yet articles like this sensationalize it and act like he invented it himself. Take the LEAP motion for example. That is a major component that he had no involvement in.

> The system uses the Leap Motion controller to track hand gestures. Implementations of the system include a version using 3D glasses, a free-standing glass projection (as seen in Iron Man) and the Oculus Rift headset for the full virtual reality experience. To top it all off, the team then printed the part in titanium using a 3D laser metal printer.

A prominent quote from the article with links to both LEAP and Oculus Rift. I'm not sure

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#58

Post by RVijay007 »

ck2 wrote: post #11

I was impressed about a minute into it and then he said "that's what we were able to do a few months ago" I was expecting he would pull the monitor away leaving a 3D holographic projection. I guess I watch too many movies, lol But the glass projection looked fascinating.

Wasn't this a scene from a Ben Affleck movie? Paycheck I think it was called.

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#59

Post by DanBC »

HN again has some depressingly negative comments.

It's good that there are people with the disposable income, and the engineering resources, to tinker with stuff like this.

This particular iteration may not be interesting to you, but we're stuck with WIMP (or WIMP-lite) environments very similar to the 40 year old versions. (More colours, more animation, bigger icons, but little actual change).

Kludging together desktop and mobile interfaces is being attempted (with a variety of horrible unpopular results) by many people, so it's great that other people are experimenting with other paradigms.

Re: Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

#60

Post by knowaveragejoe »

swamp40 wrote: post #54

The best critique I've heard of the Leap interface is that human hands are extremely proficient at manipulating small physical objects. But without any kind of force feedback, manipulating images using the Leap is neither simple nor easy. You must become like a good mime, and that takes a lot of practice and is very counter-intuitive.

In my experience with the Leap it's more important to learn the limits of the capture space and the device's sensitivity in the individual application than getting the gesture perfectly right. Another thing that people don't get immediately is that you're not signalling at the visual medium on the screen to perform tasks, rather, the screen doesn't matter at all. It's a sensory feedback loop adjustment that takes a few hours of tinkering around, but once you get it, you get it. The main problem is gorilla arm and the tediousness of some tasks, the latter of which will hopefully be solved in software. Check out the 3D skull explorer app if you get a chance, it's the best implementation of gestures I've seen for the Leap, actually usable. I could definitely see people who regularly need to manipulate 3D models using similar metaphors.
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