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

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.'"

Comments

Bah!

[Thud457]

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

Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University

[maliqua]

he's way cooler than trump

Those who do not study the past

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:Those who do not study the past

[camperdave]

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.

Re:Those who do not study the past

[Antipater]

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.

Re:Those who do not study the past

[theIsovist]

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.

Re:Those who do not study the past

[tgd]

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 ...

Re:Those who do not study the past

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University

[orthancstone]

Elon is the new Trump.

Except Elon is brilliant as opposed to a blowhard?

So, is he creating it?

[GodfatherofSoul]

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

Re:So, is he creating it?

[lxs]

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

Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University

[camperdave]

he's way cooler than trump

You might even say he trumps Trump.

Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University

[lxs]

More like Cave Johnson.

Re:Can't wait to enroll in Musk University

[ron_ivi]

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.

Do not want.

[flitty]

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.

Not a hologram

[wagnerrp]

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.

Re:Expansion Joints

[DanielRavenNest]

> "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.