Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by nrivadeneira » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 2:40 PM UTC

I'll be honest, I was pretty disappointed by this. Elon is my hero so I was excited to see what he might have come up with, but this doesn't seem like anything that your average hacker couldn't build with the tools he used.

I will say this, despite my disappointment, I'm very happy that Elon continues to push our imaginations and encourage us to believe that fantasy and sci-fi can become reality. As others have said, there are enough schmucks working on more apps (myself included) that it's refreshing to witness someone building something greater.

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

#102

Post by Symmetry » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 2:42 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #25

mhd wrote: post #14

This looks nice, but I doubt that it's really much more productive than the usual 3D mice (SpaceMouse) setup that almost every CAD shop uses. Just like touchscreens are hardly superior to ordinary mice, when you can afford to lug the latter about. And much more prone to gorilla arm syndrome. So for a desk, this is probably no big win. Maybe for some kind of highly integrated CAVE setup, where you'd be wandering about…

> This looks nice, but I doubt that it's really much more productive... You're missing the point. Musk's life is actually an elaborate experiment to see what would happen if you took a very smart 11 year-old and gave him a billion dollars to build toys.

I dunno, space travel and electric vehicles are pretty high up on the "good for the human species" scale.

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

#103

Post by DanBC » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 2:45 PM UTC

jrkelly wrote: post #92

DanBC wrote: post #59

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 desk…

My comment wasn't meant to be negative - when I posted it was all gee-wiz comments with no mention of the PR angle. Read the PG essay on PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html . Elon is a master of it and it's a big part of his job. We should celebrate technologists who know how to communicate to the public and learn how to do it better ourselves.

Apologies if my comment felt pointed at you!

You are right that examining pr tactics is useful and important. It's true that some groups use PR to pump out information about the same vapourware for years.

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

#104

Post by grannyg00se » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 3:10 PM UTC

solistice wrote: post #73

ErrantX wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they just went ahead and made it Upon such things, many successes are based :)

I'm not disagreeing with you. It's just that they take all this tech other people have worked out, slapped it together and are now happily implying that they're somehow visionaries, and that they should get credit for that and everything else they're using.

Or they are simply implying that they are using bleeding edge tech to their advantage as much as possible. And they aren't afraid to put on a little show and tell to the masses about it. Given his positions in public companies, it's not a bad move.

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

#105

Post by ollysb » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 3:12 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #59

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 desk…

Yeah, come on, imagine having a 3D version of your app running right in front of your face! I've been longing for this for as long as I've been a software engineer. Most systems have a pretty static architecture so they'd be easy to map into space. You could slow time down and literally watch requests coming in and bouncing right through your system. How much more intuitive would that be? Spotting patterns and finding problems would be so much easier. OK, enough day-dreaming for now but go Elon!

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

#106

Post by grannyg00se » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

nothingspecial wrote: post #28

solistice wrote: post #22

I'll have to go against the grain here, but this isn't anything special. The Leap has been around for a good while, the Occulus Rift has been around for a good while, and 3D Laser Sintering has been around for a while, along with every other technology they're using for this application. Also, I believe they're the wrong people to use it. Making the feedback involved visual instead of mathematical/geometrical has it'…

Just like the world wide web was nothing special since at the time it was invented * tcp/ip and the internet had been around for a good while * client/server document browsing had been around for a good while and * hypertext documents with clickable links generated from markup had been around for while (microsoft help viewer) The ideas behind the WWW had been floating around for a good while. TBL just went ahead and…

Crockford's story [1] behind the genesis of JSON is similar. Everything was already there, but he's the one who formalized it gave it an official home. That helped propel it to its current level of popularity. The fact that he didn't create javascript, the internet, the www, tcp, etc is not relevant.

[1] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/11/video-crockford-json/

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

#107

Post by Zoomla » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 3:36 PM UTC

mariusz79 wrote: post #47

Great, but how is it different from using a mouse wheel with CTRL/ALT/SHIFT combination?

it is harder to use then the mouse and keyboard combo and specially harder if you are going to use it all day.

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

#108

Post by Zoomla » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 3:41 PM UTC

31reasons wrote: post #80

Can you really make hand sculpted rockets parts for rockets that can go to space ? I thought they need micrometer accuracy for million reasons and can only be "made" using CAD softwares with mathematical precision. Its a great demo but bit misleading.

It looks like a CAD person did the modeling using real CAD tools (maybe just a mouse and keyboard).

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

#109

Post by hardwaresofton » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

talmir wrote: post #93

hardwaresofton wrote: post #76

This is like the 8th (?) time I've seen this on HN. Also, roughly everything that is amazing about this interface is the Leap Motion Controller. They're not getting enough press from this.

"This is like the 8th (?) time I've seen this on HN." Congratulations! You are a special little snowflake. This was the first time I've seen this posted and I found it cool so I appreciate the post. Better not let new people see stuff you personally have seen before! What would the world come to if that was allowed?

Great job on the snarky comment buddy -- that'll definitely set me straight!

Silly of me to consider it useful for people to check if things have been submitted before re-submitting them to the same listing/news source.

Also, way to ignore my point, this article NOT cool. It's Elon Musk propoganda (and I think the guy is awesome) -- the real hero here is the Leap Motion controller, and not enough is being said about it.

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

#110

Post by rejuvenile » Fri, Sep 06, 2013, 7:34 PM UTC

This isn't at all new in the world of mechanical engineering. Devices like the SpaceMouse (http://www.3dconnexion.com/) have been around for decades.

What is new is the Leap Motion device Elon plugged into the workstation. All of the fanciness of this UI can be attributed to the Leap Motion, which has generally been available for about a month.

So Elon plugged in a Leap Motion into software which is already programmed to use a Space Mouse, which took all of about ten seconds, then made a video and published it. What a publicity whore.

He should refrain from stunts like this, lest people get the impression that every advance at Tesla and SpaceX is, in fact, something invented elsewhere and opportunistically seized upon with as little effort as this took.