Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron Man and made it real

Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by solistice on Friday September 06, 2013 @08:02AM (#6339944)

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.

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by nothingspecial on Friday September 06, 2013 @08:13AM (#6339974)

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.

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by grannyg00se on Friday September 06, 2013 @11:23AM (#6340873)

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.

[1] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/11/video-crockford-json/

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by tuananh on Friday September 06, 2013 @08:23AM (#6340026)

To me it's like Apple. They doesn't invent any ground-breaking technology. They just combine them; use them at the right time.

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by mattmanser on Friday September 06, 2013 @08:11AM (#6339970)

the tech is there, they just went ahead and made it. That's not groundbreaking

And that's where we disagree.

To me that's the very definition of groundbreaking.

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by samuelfine on Friday September 06, 2013 @09:25AM (#6340288)

Exactly. If "going ahead and making it" was the only barrier, why didn't it exist yet?

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by solistice on Friday September 06, 2013 @09:40AM (#6340349)

Well, technically it exists. http://robbietilton.com/blog/?p=1589 https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~adam/airharp/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLqLmvL75B0

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?"

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by ErrantX on Friday September 06, 2013 @08:24AM (#6340027)

> they just went ahead and made it

Upon such things, many successes are based :)

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by solistice on Friday September 06, 2013 @09:28AM (#6340297)

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.

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Re:Elon Musk took the futuristic gesture interface from Iron... by grannyg00se on Friday September 06, 2013 @11:10AM (#6340809)

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.

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