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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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].
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."
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 :)
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.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadImpressive, only because they added hardware such as the Oculus Rift, but it's almost the same as the DNA demo for Leap Motion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_HH-ucA_Us
Having said that, it is cool...
Nothing revolutionary though he just put the pieces together. It needs more tweaking before it can be very useful.
But the glass projection looked fascinating.
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/paych...
He feels to me like he's really pushing the boundaries of human innovation.
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.
Oculus Rift / or a normal Display and MS Kinnect make it obviously usable for a mass of users.
Only the Software has to support the kind of IO.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The two are not mutually exclusive. This is as valid a tech demo as, say, some esoteric ECMAScript 6 feature no one can yet use.
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.
A prominent quote from the article with links to both LEAP and Oculus Rift. I'm not sure
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.
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...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQSLWQxzjiw
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton
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.
And that's where we disagree.
To me that's the very definition of groundbreaking.
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?"
[1] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/11/video-crockford-json/
Upon such things, many successes are based :)
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.
It is an additive 3d printing process based on atomic diffusion.
I believe I saw an advertisement (possibly for an eos model) where they 3d printed titanium parts for surgical replacement.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_metal_laser_sintering
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 :)
But without any kind of force feedback, manipulating images using the Leap is neither simple nor easy.
You must become like a good mime, and that takes a lot of practice and is very counter-intuitive.