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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.'"

28 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Bah! by Thud457 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's all just hand-waving and smoke & mirrors.

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  2. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by maliqua · · Score: 3, Insightful

    he's way cooler than trump

  3. Jurassic Park by jgtg32a · · Score: 2

    Just get an Oculus Rift and you've got the VR setup they used in Jurassic Park. Almost as good but a whole lot cheaper.

  4. Those who do not study the past by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    However, it looks so cool, ignoring the fact that the first priority of any user interface is usability. Well, any user interface that you use for any length of time. It's sad that movies so pervade the modern consciousness that people can't see outside their blinders.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    1. Re:Those who do not study the past by Frigga's+Ring · · Score: 2

      I thought the same thing. My phone can already tell what I'm looking at. Wouldn't it make more sense to expand that technology? You may still need a button interface to distinguish something you're looking at and something you want to click on, but at least then you open up computer access to more accessibility-challenged people than hand waving.

    2. Re:Those who do not study the past by camperdave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hold my hand out like barbers, and electricians, and mechanics, and cooks, and baseball players, and housewives, and bricklayers, and makeup artists, and painters, and a myriad of other professions have been doing throughout all of recorded history? It's obviously possible to use your arms all day long, so clearly the UI designers are not designing touchscreen/gesture interfaces properly.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    3. 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.

    4. Re:Those who do not study the past by Antipater · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't understand why "gorilla arm" has become such an issue with touchscreens when teachers have been using chalkboards/markerboards for decades.

      Moreover, I can see exactly where Mr. Musk is coming from. The new generation of 3d drafting programs is moving away from the monotonous "line, define length + angle, new line, define length + angle ad nauseam" into a more dynamic "stretch + mold"-type UI. The one that I've worked with is called SpaceClaim. The most common comment I've heard is "it's like shaping play-doh on a computer screen." The second-most common comment I've heard is "it would work so much better if I could just grab it instead of using annoying, ambiguous mouse clicks."

      The Stark-style hologram thing really is the intuitive answer to people's issues with the new drafting paradigm. With Mr. Musk being at the forefront of modern engineering, I'm sure he's seen those issues, and I applaud him for taking the steps to solve them. If "gorilla arm" happens as a result, then maybe we as engineers should stop being pussies and get some stronger arms.

      --
      Everything is better with chainsaws.
    5. Re:Those who do not study the past by theIsovist · · Score: 3

      Can we please stop with the karma whoring that is "gorilla arm syndrome reminder"? Everyone keeps bringing this up every time a new interface is created, as if nothing new under the sun will ever work. If you want to fault this, you would probably do much better questioning the ability of a user to create refined designs on the level of rocket science with just his hands floating in mid air. There's nothing to press against, nothing to provide feedback. That would require very intricate control indeed.

    6. Re:Those who do not study the past by tgd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      However, it looks so cool, ignoring the fact that the first priority of any user interface is usability. Well, any user interface that you use for any length of time. It's sad that movies so pervade the modern consciousness that people can't see outside their blinders.

      You could always put your arms down for a break. You know, like glass blowers, potters, or pretty much anyone who builds things with their hands already does and have done pretty much as long as creatures had arms.

      So, as you say, those who do not study the past ...

    7. Re:Those who do not study the past by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't understand why "gorilla arm" has become such an issue with touchscreens when teachers have been using chalkboards/markerboards for decades.

      Speaking as someone who had to write on a whiteboard for several hours a day (I was a Teaching Assistant during grad school and had to regularly handle lectures, labs, and other sessions with students for several years), I feel as if you've neglected to consider the obvious fact that no one uses a whiteboard from arm's length, simply because it would lead to gorilla arm. In the end, I do agree with your premise that this is a direction we should be going. Even so, I'm still gonna talk about whiteboards and why your comparison is wrong. :P

      So, when was the last time you saw anyone stand with their arm fully extended and write on a whiteboard? No one does that, or if they do, they stop after a few minutes because it's simply untenable. The way people write on whiteboards is by standing close to them and then bending their elbows so that their upper arm rests against the side of their body and their forearm is extended towards the board. If someone needs to write something to the side or down low, most of the time you'll see them reposition their entire body rather than extend their arm, and if they need to write above, they'll still position themselves so that their shoulder carries the weight.

      Doing it that way solves the two major concerns with vertical surfaces: stamina and control. It allows the weight of the arm to be carried by the shoulder, rather than by the upper arm, making it a position that someone can work from for hours at a time. Second, it reduces the portion of the arm that is extended away from the body, thus minimizing the amount of undesirable wobble generated by your arm. Basically, it allows you to work for extended periods of time with a great deal of finesse. That's why people are able to use chalkboards and whiteboards for hours at a time while still remaining legible (we'll ignore that professor everyone had whose writing was inscrutable).

      Unfortunately, if you're manipulating virtual objects in a three-dimensional space using your arms, you have nothing on which to support your arms, and, unlike a whiteboard, you can't rely on being able to put your arms at your side for support. Whether you're fit or fat, if you're having to hold your arms out in front of you without support for more than a few minutes, you won't be able to maintain the sort of fine control necessary to make careful adjustments for more than a few minutes. For instance, if you're having to grip a 3D object and stretch it into a shape you want without being able to release it, there's a clock running for how long you have before you arms start to wobble and create undesirable motion. Similarly, having someone control a virtual race car by turning a virtual steering wheel that's floating in a three-dimensional space would also be a bad idea, since most folks would only be able to go a few laps around the course before their arms would give.

      That said, if you're making Tony Stark style motions where you're grabbing, manipulating, letting go, and then resting your arms in between, it'll work just fine. Same for Minority Report style stuff, since the interface simply doesn't rely on having your arms outstretched for extended periods of time. So, basically, I think you're spot-on correct that this needs to happen. Where I disagree is that I believe gorilla arms are still a problem that needs to be considered, but they're a design issue that can be designed around, rather than being a deal-breaker. Developers just need to consider the nature of the interactions that they're asking their users to make with the program, and ensure that none of them involve maintaining arm positions that can't be held for long.

    8. Re:Those who do not study the past by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      If you want to fault this, you would probably do much better questioning the ability of a user to create refined designs on the level of rocket science with just his hands floating in mid air. There's nothing to press against, nothing to provide feedback. That would require very intricate control indeed.

      Right, if you had never done any drafting (by which I mean even just one class in autocad, good old-fashioned drafting, or both) then you might reasonably think that this would be a problem. But since you can draw shapes and then re-dimension them afterwards, or you can draw shapes constrained to dimensions, in practice this isn't really a limitation. It's just another issue which has to be taken into account when designing the interface. Perhaps arm motion will handle large-scale motion and finger motion will provide fine adjustment. In any case, just like gorilla arm syndrome, this is an issue which can be "solved" in the interface design.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by orthancstone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Elon is the new Trump.

    Except Elon is brilliant as opposed to a blowhard?

  6. So, is he creating it? by GodfatherofSoul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Or positing it? After the vacuum tube BS stories, I refuse to read another Elon Musk-slobbering fest article.

    --
    I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
    1. Re:So, is he creating it? by lxs · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If that is your attitude then you are much poorer than you can ever imagine.

  7. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

    he's way cooler than trump

    You might even say he trumps Trump.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  8. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by lxs · · Score: 5, Funny

    More like Cave Johnson.

  9. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Comparing him to trump should be considered an insult.

  10. 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.

  11. Reading comprehension fail ... by tgd · · Score: 2

    This has been posted all over the place, and it always talks about the Iron Man displays.

    Nowhere does Musk say that. He says he will design a rocket nozzle with his hands and print it with a 3D printer.

    You can do that today with some software and a Kinect or other motion tracker.

    Nowhere does he talk about 3D displays hanging in space. Gesture controlled solid modeler and 3D printer. That's it.

    1. Re:Reading comprehension fail ... by Teancum · · Score: 2

      Funny thing, Elon Musk has several patents to his name. Look them up in the USPTO database if you don't believe me. I thought you had to actually design something in order to be credited with a patent. Perhaps I'm mistaken. Are you really sure he wasn't involved in the actual design part of the engineering here?

      Yes, he also hires other engineers. His companies are far too big for him to do that all by himself. I'll also admit that even skilled engineers who end up getting "kicked upstairs" to become management (usually because they are so good that it is time to pick *somebody* to be manager and it might as well be the one with the best skills at the job) usually end up wasting most of their time doing administrative stuff rather than actual engineering/coding/getting hands dirty really making things. None the less, Elon Musk has been doing some actual design, even if he isn't doing all of the details himself. He sure as hell is sitting in the brainstorming sessions with the other engineers when they are coming up with all of the alternatives and Musk has been making the final big decisions on where to go after the appropriate feedback. That is sort of how engineering management works.

      Besides, I have never seen Elon Musk fail to give credit to the other guys who are helping him out. He may be a brutal taskmaster and somebody who you don't want to slack off when he is anywhere nearby, but he has gone out of his way to know everything about the companies he is building and how all of the things work.

      I certainly wouldn't want to challenge Elon Musk to take a Saturday (or some day of the week when the plant is otherwise shut down) and try to personally build a Tesla Model S by himself with maybe just a couple of people helping him out as he moves down the production line. He might even be able to pull that one off.

      I'll agree that there are managers who really never learned engineering in the first place and mostly have an MBA, thus they were put in charge. Elon Musk just isn't one of those kind of managers though. Are you one of those people who insists that Werner Von Braun didn't design the Saturn V rocket? Or that Sergei Korolev had nothing to do with the design of the Vostock nor Soyuz rockets and was just some politician put in charge by the Politburo taking credit for the whole project?

  12. Do not want. by flitty · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As someone who does this for a living, let me tell you that Elon Musk is a idea guy, not a user. These guys are a dime a dozen and often see things like iPads and flashy technology as "the future", but in implementation, they miss out on things like Ease of User Input, and Long term use strain. A spaceball and a mouse are about the best you can get for 3d space navigation for long periods of time, which is how the people who actually build this stuff use it daily.

    You can see this yourself if you want to do a little accuracy experiment. Take your mouse and move it a pixel. Now, take your hand, hold it in the air, and move your hand that same amount without the help of friction on the table or the mouse to rest your hand on. Even if LeapMotion and other 3d space tracking systems were that accurate, it's not an optimal setup for actually doing work, due to strain and other issues. Now, I don't often need single pixel-accuracy, but 4-5 pixel accuracy is needed more often than you think.

    Elon Musk sits in a "end item" meeting where the final design is 3d modeled and displayed on a screen, and pictorial representation of that model is manipulated using leap motion. Great. But actual engineering design work done this way? He's dreaming. Or, he's just talking about using Leap Motion et al tied to a CAD program, in which case... Who cares? He's not the first, and he's certainly not a visionary on the subject.

    --
    Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
  13. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by Salgak1 · · Score: 2

    When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!

    - Cave Johnson

  14. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 2

    I'm sure that someone who manages to run not one, but two game-changing companies while already having succeeded with another one is both brilliant and a blowhard. However, I think that linking to a site that posts drivel like this (you have to read it to believe it....) http://boycotttesla.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/tesla-and-fisker-use-vaginal-orifice-to-trick-rich-guys-into-buying-cars/ and to gawker, which is the equivalent of a tabloid for tech, makes you sound like someone who believes that Aliens are replacing the president with a monkey-boy so that they can destroy the US through Universal Healthcare. I.e., a total crackpot.

    --
    Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
  15. 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.

  16. not the same by Chirs · · Score: 2

    In all those cases, your arms are not constantly out in front of you. Much of the time your arms are hanging down, or resting on something else. When they're not, they're often tucked in closer to the body which makes them easier to hold up.

    The simplest solution to a 3D holographic interface is to plant your elbows on a surface to support the weight of your arm, and then move mostly your fingers with some hand movement.

  17. Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University by St.Creed · · Score: 2

    He's not schrewd enough to realize his tepid steps into the waters of business are just temporary, unless he can make a firm footing for those charging stations nation-wide.

    Unlike everyone else who looks at the problem and sees that this is a big issue. But this guy must be stupid. After all, what did *he* ever do while you were making smart slashdot posts? We all know what effort goes into a good snide remark on slashdot!

    --
    Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
  18. Re:Expansion Joints by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > "How, I wondered, is Musk going to solve the thermal expansion problem?

    I used to walk under a solution every day going to work, where work was the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. They needed a way to test the optics of the Chandra X-Ray Telescope on the ground, so they built a 1000 foot (300 meter) vacuum pipe that connected an X-Ray source at one end to a vacuum chamber with the optics at the other. The reason for the long distance was to have the source at "infinity" optically, and it needed to be vacuum so air would not absorb or scatter the X-Rays.

    This pipe ran outdoors, because it was longer than the building, and they wanted the X-Ray source away from other people working there. Naturally it had to deal with expansion due to heat and cold. It was handled with a metal bellows expansion joint (http://www.wahlcometroflex.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/metalrolledopt.jpg) between pipe sections, and the pipes themselves were on sliding support brackets on the concrete columns that held them up. So they can expand and contract as needed, and the bellows takes up the motion.

    For the Hyperloop application, you would use finger expansion joints (http://www.ilwontec.com/eng/wp-content/uploads/contents/big_finger_expansion_joint.gif) inside the bellows. These are used on bridges for the same thermal expansion reason between the piers and suspended part of the roadway. Instead of being flat like in the picture, they would be circular, following the shape of the main pipe.