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.
I agree that tinkering is good, but this seem more like hype than tinkering. This demo (rotating stuff with gestures) has been done over and over, and hyped up each time as the future, like in the movies, and doing it one more time is not engineering and is not problem-solving. Real experimentation is one thing, but more glitzy demos that aren't actually usable is the last thing "virtual reality" type interfaces need: that's been what has sunk the field over and over for 30 years and gotten it a negative reputation.
Particularly the part about how it's from the Iron Man movie is silly, because it's not like this is some futuristic interface that previously only existed in films. It's been done, in real life, a number of times. The hard problem is making it usable, not just demoing its mere existence yet again.
I worked in a Fortune 500 company that designed mechanical product. Every single one of the 3,000 CAD operators in the company had a 3D mouse on their desk. You too can have one for $350 minimum. This stuff is not the future in that field, it's routine.
Does it translate out to most people surfing the internet and jockeying Excel all day? No. But in the field of designing 3D mechanical things, 2D mice are not the norm right now.
What makes you think it's not usable? He said it's hooked up to the software they use to design the rocket, and demoed a couple of actual parts. If rocket designers are using this stuff to visualize the rockets they're designing, how is that just a glitzy demo?
At the end, he makes the statement that this will revolutionize design and manufacturing, but I don't think that's pretty reasonable, given that Space X is in the business of design and manufacturing, not VR research.
Maybe he's not showing us everything? SpaceX competitive advantage is that they do everything in house. So he probably doesn't want to show all their capabilities. But it sure acts as a great recruiting tool.
> HN again has some depressingly negative comments.
Agreed. I feel like any time I read a Tesla article on HN, people feel the need to criticize it for the sake of "balancing the debate". I recommend just not reading the article if you're really that biased against Tesla, and not taking part in the discussion. It doesn't add anything more than a few flame wars.
Besides, isn't it nice to see something that doesn't look like Bootstrap, Foundation, etc. (name one)? I feel like if anything doesn't follow certain unspoken laws of minimalism decided by the startup gods, the UI becomes terrible by default. I've seen Heroku's redesign praised by many people on HN, but to me it just seems like a factory-stamped Bootstrap print-out. If all this "Iron Man" stuff is "been there, done that", then what about all the same sort of criticism for the umpteenth Bootstrap clone?
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.
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.
I think there's something of a cultural divide here. To me it seems like a lot of HN users have taken PG's oft quoted statement:
"At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."
And turned it into:
"Most things dismissed as toys are worth investing in."
Here's the thing, from where I'm sitting this is Light Pen Redux 2.0, as other commentators have pointed out, the system looks like a great way to induce the gorilla arm effect. Maybe there are aspects of this that SpaceX has a real use for, I'm not a rocket engineer. But I don't think it's out of line to call this what it appears to be, a PR piece.
>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)
Well, more colours, more animation, more GPU power, etc are enablers of very important stuff that was impossible back in the day. For example, you didn't edit live video streams, with filters applied in real time, on those 40 year old version. We also have multi-touch now.
I'n not sure about the "we're stuck" meme. It's like taking for granted that there is something entirely different for UI interaction (as opposed to incrementally better).
Well, 3D interfaces are about as old as the WIMP. And what experience has showed as those 20-30 years we experiment with them is they are not really better for a lot of stuff.
Some things are just better in a specific way -- in the way that, say, reading gives us more information density than speach or watching a video, so those can never replace it and still have that.
Or in the way that speech recognition is a nice novelty, and perhaps essential for people with hand inpedements (or with hands engaged in another activity), but it's extremely tiring for writing a blog post or input of large-ish amounts of text (as anyone who had to talk for a presentation or a class of students for an hour or more already knows).
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!
Perhaps we are reading too much into what he is saying. I could see his enthusiasm and hope that 3D printing and associated toolchain is going to bring to us.
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.
>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.
> HN should be able to tell the difference between good PR and good tech.
You know what? I make an exception to that in Elons case. There are plenty of people who do that and who leave us pretty much where we were before. Think of the tons of Microsoft Research projects that are mighty cool and are thrown in our face every half year or so... but never go anywhere expect right in the basket of "well, I guess Microsoft isn't entirely dead, yet" PR.
Is this extremely exciting stuff in itself? No. But it is still exciting to me because I know if Elon does it, he will follow up and make the best of the opportunity. It is the marriage between the person and the project - in the Microsoft example, some, probably mostly PR, division comes up with "oh, I suppose that's neat" on a regular basis, but what they do has no direct link to any real life implementation. What you need is that connection of being able to dream big and execute big - and for that, the impulse has to come from engineering, not PR.
It's like knowing that Carmack is hooked on VR goggles. For some things, the person doing the thing really makes all the difference in the world.
Just how I feel about his brand: he'll probably build it. And that is pretty big. We face a lot of disappointment when it comes to tech promises. They don't all have to me amazing and change out lives now, so long as they credibly _could_ later. Musk seems to actually implement things and has the power to actually drive a project forward, so this is neat.
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.
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.
Everything we all do in life builds heavily on what others have done before us. The article explicitly states the components he used. The interesting part of the article is that he's attempting to take these extremely new and young components and use them together for something that helps them engineer components of their rockets. That's the way forward for many of these technologies is to find real viable use cases and refine them until using it for that given purpose is successful.
"Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real"
Which futuristic gesture interface did he create exactly? I am sorry I missed this in the article. He used the LEAP motion device to interact with a 3D software.
The truth here is nothing has been created, new use cases have not been thought up, actually there is very little news contained within the article. Yet we have a sensational headline at the top of hacker news simply because it is Elon Musk.
> 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
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...
So what? Let's hope that he's got a really bad case of it.
He's got 7 billion dollars and a lot of resources that he can bring to bear. If he continues to take a deeper dive into its uses he could help spur further development. Either by creating the products with his team, or by purchasing third party solutions, thereby "investing" in other companies.
Now Elon needs to figure out how to incorporate an exoskeleton suit into one of his companies.
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's applications (quickly looking through the design), but it'll still have to be made to precise tolerances, and that's an engineers job, not a sculptors.
On the other hand, it's perfect for sculptors and designers. If their setup is considerably improved in resolution, designers can get very fast visual feedback, and trying out things suddenly becomes very cheap. Architects can mold parts of their buildings, your furniture can get those last brushes before it's milled out, and your phone can be molded to "just perfect".
But this isn't a Musk thing, nor is it an Iron Man thing, the idea has been floating around for a good while, the tech is there, they just went ahead and made it. That's not groundbreaking, and it isn't revolutionizing manufacturing.
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 made it.
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.
Robert Tiltons application is almost everything Musk seems to have done, except the lack of interfacing with CAD software (for example gesture based modification).
The other 2 links are, whilst only tangentially related, really cool, so I thought I'd post them as well.
So really, the question isn't "Why didn't it exist yet?" it's "Why was Elon's system featured on thenextweb, and Roberts wasn't?"
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.
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.
What if this technology simply let you rotate, pan, zoom, etc. using your other hand, which would otherwise be unused?
I don't do 3D modelling so I'm not sure if this would actually be an improvement, but getting the other hand into play seems like a good jump from regular one-handed mouse-intensive work.
That's what a space navigator does, and I find it pretty useless. The whole thing looks pretty lame to me. Essentially Apple's multitouch conventions partially translated to motion tracking.
We all know who Elon Musk is talking to. It's not us. It's the other billion people on youtube who will watch this and go, "this is the coolest thing I have ever seen".
This is definitely not geared toward techies. The closeup of the mouse and keyboard in the first few seconds is meant to make average people think "Oooh, this is high tech."
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
Glass projection has been around a long time and typically uses a foil fixed to the glass and a rear projection projector. If you want to experiment it is an off the shelf component from suppliers like prodisplay.com or glimmscreensinternational.com and used probably most widely for shop and theater designers.
"Elon Musk Learns Leap Motion and builds a grabbing tool" should probably be the title. I don't get what the hype is all about. It looks as though as his team just created a program that can change the position and rotation of a virtual model in space. I know the community here on HN seems to worship Elon Musk, but that demo definitely was NOT making the Iron Man gesture interface real.
Sorry guys. While the "concept" is nice, i think this is quite overselling a new "manifacturing" process which obviously (at least for anyone who has any CAD modeling and manifacturing experience) is far from being anyhow usable in industry.
Why overselling? Because the precision provided by that tool (as shown in the video) is surely not enough to achieve anything other than reviewing CAD models.
Sadly, there is no creation or modification of hardware using the interface. I can see why, it's extremely hard to use CAD etc with a mouse and keyboard, let alone creating an interface just for hand movements.
Impressive, only because they added hardware such as the Oculus Rift, but it's almost the same as the DNA demo for Leap Motion.
Since when does designing something consist only of zooming and panning the obviously already designed object? Nice for presentation, but now try offestting a single component a couple of mm with it, which is something you typically do a lot in CAD.
Amazing technology by what I consider one of the greatest visionaries of our generation. I do wonder however if this is something you could do all day, instead of using a mouse. It seems rather straining, holding your arms in front of you all day.
Folks, "there's nothing new", until there is. At some point, new tech is a toy and dismissed because of its limitations. The whole idea is to identify those limitations and push through them.
SpaceX actually has some use for new ways to interact with virtual 3D objects. Everyone is focusing on modelling, but there's also the visualization. Which can be more important than the modelling itself. For comparison, think about how much time you spend writing code, vs reading and debugging code.
Technologies like these enables us to get new ways of looking at things. We are focusing on rotation and panning, but gesture-based interfaces can provide so much more.
Also, we are thinking about people sitting at desks, where other input devices might be more desirable. But what about gesture-based screens in other environments. Say, at the factories themselves? We are visual beings and we like to point at stuff (and talk about stuff). Maybe a combination of speech recognition and gestures would enable new interactions with machines?
Yeah, comparing to Iron Man is silly, but it is amusing. And easy for the average Joe to understand. That is PR, and NASA could learn from it.
This idea is very old and there is nothing new here. The first interface allowing to move object on screen using gesture or touch screen were abandoned. Why? because maintaining your arms in the air to manipulate object is exhausting. You cannot work more than a few minutes at a time.
Much more promising are brain-computer interface.
This video shows him rather ham-fistedly interacting with a 3D model of a rocket engine assembly, then for some reason he goes on to show it being 3D printed.
Anyone involved in using 3D CAD and component design, including using Siemens NX which he refers to in the video will have seen or used a six axis Space mouse controller by 3D connexion which costs a few hundred bucks and is massively more precise than using a leap motion.
These space mice have been available for well over a decade and use simple optical encoders to derive translation and rotation.
No doubt the leap motion has uses at and beyond the desktop but it has a way to go yet to overcome the problems in the algorithms for interpreting gestures at a distance.
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.
> To top it all off, the team then printed the part in titanium using a 3D laser metal printer.
If such a beast does exist I'd be even more amazed than the leapmotion controller. But I have a nagging feeling the author doesn't know what they are talking about.
milling =/= printing
Edit: Well then, I stand corrected. I wasn't even aware there were 3D metal printers available.
Such a thing does exist and it's explained in the video, although it's not exactly printing and the wikipedia article doesn't call it printing either[1].
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.
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.
Seems like we've got quite a long way to go before this is "Iron Man" quality. It looks like they've hooked up all the latest bits of cool tech to each other just for the fun of it.
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.
It looks realy akward when he needs to hold his arm still while closing his hands.
I'm skeptic of the current state of "gesture/3D/motion/whatever" controls, but there is a big potential here.
3D design tries to work around the problem of working with 2D screens by showing multiple sides at once (Front/Left/Top/Perspective). You have to adjust objects in at least 2 screens to get it right, which isn't a perfect solution as well.
This looks quite a bit less useful than Oblong's tech, which is already commercially available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcMhZ9J0qN8 That's John Underkoffler, the MIT Media Lab guy who designed the Minority Report interface and thought it was realistic.
Didn't a few people at MIT do this about 5 years ago? I seem to recall seeing something like this in demo form (not production-ready, obviously) about that long ago. It could read gestures and perform functions (i.e. if you framed something with your fingers, the built-in camera would take the picture), if I recall correctly.
At one point while manipulating the CAD software, the person conducting has to use their hand as a mouse. They stick out their pointer finger and slowly move the cursor around. This is not much different from using a mouse. However, it makes visualizing the manifold very simple and intuitive, which gives this experiment real value.
So what he can do in the video is not exactly revolutionary. But none of those techs can live up to their potential without this kind of experimentation and integration with each other.
It's not the next Tesla, but I'm glad to see someone taking these technologies seriously, even when they have some work ahead of them.
By using the Leap Motion SDK and something like Unity (a 3D Engine) this is really easy todo, well the zooming and rotating stuff atleast. Same goes for Oculus Rift integration.
However, seeing it all combined like this using a 3D printer in the end is really inspiring, it just sparks so many ideas in my head immediatly :)
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.
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.
I wonder why he doesn't start 10 side companies run by other people. Say a CAD software company. It's a bit strange format to put out a 3:49 minute video.
My guess is that most commenters on HN have a CS background and are not immersed in the world of mechanical design. This demo is not unlike that saying about sufficiently advanced science looking like magic. Demos like these are definitely of the kind that provoke lots excitement from people who don't work in the field and, generally speaking, exactly the opposite reaction from those who do.
I must also note that Musk is a deity on HN and, therefore, anyone posting anything counter to what he says is often met with negative reactions. In general terms one is labeled a hater and things go downhill from there.
I straddle the software, electronics and mechanical design worlds and have devoted a significant amount of time and effort to mastering the tools of each discipline. In mechanical design my tool of choice these days is Solidworks. I have also used AutoCAD and ProE extensively.
I would never, ever, in a million years, want to spend eight or more hours a day moving my hands around in the air to design mechanical parts. It would be a horrible productivity sapping experience. A trackball and keyboard, once you've learned the interface, form an effortless man-machine interface to design parts with software such as Solidworks. My preference is for trackballs. When using one, in a very real sense, you are touching, grabbing and interacting with the objects on your screen. It feels very natural. More importantly, it is fast, accurate and ergonomically sustainable for long hours.
I realize I need to provide context for someone who comes from pure CS to get a grip on what I am saying here. Here it is: Imagine someone came along and suggested that instead of using VIM, your favorite editor or IDE you consider using this new interface that requires you having your hands in the air all day to manipulate graphical objects that, when linked together, create programs.
It would look very slick. Perhaps they'd even make a reference to a similar concept see in a movie. You would probably recoil at the very idea and post negative comments on HN. Those outside the CS world would see it as an incredible potential advance in the field and call you haters for not praising an attempt to advance the art.
That's exactly what we are looking at here. I can't think of many people who do MCAD for a living who would think this is actually useful at any level except for one: It might be cool to have as a presentation tool. It would be neat to allow anyone to feel like they are touching and manipulating objects in free space in an intuitive fashion. That's it.
The other more subjective point I'd like to make is that I find myself wondering why Musk/Tesla/SpaceX are burning clock cycles working on anything outside of their core missions. The fact that he had engineers spend time on the Hyperloop and this doesn't sit well with me. I could be wrong, of course, and I am sure there are plenty who will point that out. I just don't think these companies are mature enough to engage in such pointless distractions.
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.