Elon Musk is, I've concluded, the closest thing to Leonardo Da Vinci or another Renaissance Man that we have in modern times. After initially starting web publishing company Zip2 with his brother, Musk transitioned to even greater success in subsequent (and better known) ventures; c-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, founder of SpaceX, chairman of the board (and largest shareholder) of SolarCity, and (publicly announced just a few weeks ago) inventor of the Hyperloop high-speed transit system. So it is that when in late August Musk tweeted that he'd "figured out how to design rocket parts just w[ith] hand movements," and would post a video of the process "next week," I wasn't surprised or even cynical.
Admittedly, it took a few days more than a week for Musk to follow through on his promise, but as the above video shows, follow through he did. His off-the-shelf system, reminiscent of scenes from the movie Iron Man, incorporates an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, a 3-D projector, a holograph-like display, and a Leap Motion gesture controller. As I wrote a month ago, initial Leap Motion reviews have been (to put it kindly) underwhelming. And the system's biometric support seems to much less secure than was initially touted. Nonetheless, the company reports 1 million app downloads (and 25,000 SDK downloads) over the device's first three weeks post-launch. And compelling applications allude to the controller's potential, no matter that it may not yet be fully (or even substantially) realized. Elon Musk certainly thinks so.
For more coverage on Musk's prototype system to gesture-design parts before 3D-printing them, see the following coverage:
