You know how in the Iron Man movies, Tony Stark has an ultra-high-tech lab where he can manipulate 3D holograms with his hands? Well, it's totally fake — unless you happen to be Elon Musk. The celebrity CEO has built a 1.0 version of that lab with technology anyone can buy.
In a YouTube video from SpaceX, Musk's rocket-building company, he shows how he created a design lab that employs a Leap Motion controller to manipulate 3D designs via gesture. As Musk demonstrates configuring a rocket part by waving his palm up and down — a more natural way to interact with design, he says.
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"We started playing around ... and using a few things that are available out there, such as Leap Motion and Siemens NX, which is what we use to design the rocket, and we wrote some code to integrate the two," he explains in the video.
"If you can just go in there and do what you need to do — just understanding the fundamentals of the thing should work, as opposed to figure out how to make the computer make it work, then you can achieve a lot more in a lot shorter period of time."
For the actual rocket design, Musk leveled-up the lab idea with CAD software, 3D projection (he even name-checks the Iron Man movies at one point), and finally the virtual-reality headset Oculus Rift. The Oculus was the best solution, Musk says, since it tracks your head position and you "really are moving around the object."
For an encore, Musk takes the designed rocket part and makes it a real object via 3D printing. A laser metal printer creates the part by laying metallic particles layer by layer and blasting them with frickin' laser beams to melt them onto prior layers.
How do you like Musk's Iron Man lab? Let us know in the comments.
Image: Dario Cantatore/Getty Images