Check Out Elon Musk’s Crazy Gesture-Controlled Rocket-Designing Machine
Spin your hands, and the rocket spins, too. In 3-D.
After promising on Twitter recently to show off an Iron Man-style 3-D interface for designing rocket engines, SpaceX and Tesla Motors founder/billionaire smart dude Elon Musk made good on his promise by releasing this video showing the setup.
The software was created from a combination of gesture-control system Leap Motion and NX Siemens, which was used to design SpaceX’s rockets. That, at first, made for a simple, movable picture of rocket parts on a 2-D screen. After that, SpaceX experimented with 3-D viewing technology, and eventually hooked up the software with the Oculus Rift, an awesome virtual reality gaming headset. Finally, the system was hooked up to a 3-D printer, which can create titanium rocket parts on demand.