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Comment by jrkelly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

Why do good PR and good tech have to be mutually exclusive? Especially in a community such as Hacker News, shouldn't they be the same thing, in a way?

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.

Need there be a "difference" between the two? Can this not be both - using cool tech they've developed for PR?

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...

You are right. This has no engineering benefits, but it surely helps the Tesla & SpaceX Stock.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton

I also respect Elon, but call me when he has something like "Jarvis"[1] :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQSLWQxzjiw

It's great for marketing, sure, though they're working on technology that they feel will help with the efficiencies of developing. I hope it helps.

It's not useful for engineering yet.

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