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Elon Musk's New Hologram Project Invites 'Iron Man' Comparisons

Posted by samzenpus on from the mandarin-approved dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "In the 'Iron Man' trilogy, billionaire inventor Tony Stark uses a gesture-controlled hologram to draft new designs of the titular armor, sending virtual parts flying around his lab with the flick of a wrist. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—who is often compared to Stark by the tech press—is apparently creating the real-life equivalent of that fictional hologram system. 'We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously),' he Tweeted August 23. 'Now need a high frame rate holograph generator.' In a follow-up Tweet, he added: 'Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium.' But Musk has no plans to actually make an Iron Man-inspired suit of armor. 'I am not going to make an IM suit,' he wrote on Twitter, 'however design by hand-manipulated hologram is actually useful.'"

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Those who do not study the past by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It won't work. When you hold your hand out from your body for an extended period of time, your arm gets tired and begins to droop. This is known as "gorilla arm syndrome" and is used as a textbook example of what not to do when designing user interfaces.

    Ballroom dancer here (yea, I know, used it to get some exercise and meet people outside a computer). By definition when dancing your hands are held up... and you can do it all day. It is perhaps hard in the very beginning, but you learn very quickly.

    By the same logic, touch screens are a fail because my grandmother has difficulty bringing up the Android keyboard as she is not used to touch interfaces.

  2. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by ron_ivi · · Score: 3, Informative
    He's both brilliant and blowhard.
    • He had a lot of tension with his Paypal investors: http://gawker.com/227491/sequoia-erases-elon-musk : "Musk was a charismatic chancer, backed by the venture capital firm, with an online bank which wasn't going anywhere. He was involved in Paypal only in so far as he managed to talk his way into a 50-50 merger with the successful online payments service, and served as CEO until his wayward management style provoked a staff revolt."
    • He had tensions with his wife(s): http://boycotttesla.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/the-problem-with-elon-musks-women/
    • He had tensions with Tesla's founder: www.wired.com/autopia/2009/06/eberhard : "Teslaâ(TM)s Founder Sues Teslaâ(TM)s CEO"

    Still brilliant - but (like many brilliant people) he can be quite the blowhard too.

  3. Not a hologram by wagnerrp · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, every other news outlet has already gotten this wrong, but I expected better from Slashdot. A hologram is an application of phased array optics. You have a 2D surface. That surface contains a series of seemingly arbitrary fields of light and dark. Those fields, when illuminated with a coherent light source (like a LASER), produce an interference pattern which reproduces the light field emanating from a 3D object as it passes through that 2D surface. In essence, it creates a window through which you can view true 3D. That shit in Iron Man, with images floating in air... that's not a hologram.