It's good that there are people with the disposable income, and the engineering resources, to tinker with stuff like this.
This particular iteration may not be interesting to you, but we're stuck with WIMP (or WIMP-lite) environments very similar to the 40 year old versions. (More colours, more animation, bigger icons, but little actual change).
Kludging together desktop and mobile interfaces is being attempted (with a variety of horrible unpopular results) by many people, so it's great that other people are experimenting with other paradigms.
I agree that tinkering is good, but this seem more like hype than tinkering. This demo (rotating stuff with gestures) has been done over and over, and hyped up each time as the future, like in the movies, and doing it one more time is not engineering and is not problem-solving. Real experimentation is one thing, but more glitzy demos that aren't actually usable is the last thing "virtual reality" type interfaces need: that's been what has sunk the field over and over for 30 years and gotten it a negative reputation.
Particularly the part about how it's from the Iron Man movie is silly, because it's not like this is some futuristic interface that previously only existed in films. It's been done, in real life, a number of times. The hard problem is making it usable, not just demoing its mere existence yet again.
I worked in a Fortune 500 company that designed mechanical product. Every single one of the 3,000 CAD operators in the company had a 3D mouse on their desk. You too can have one for $350 minimum. This stuff is not the future in that field, it's routine.
Does it translate out to most people surfing the internet and jockeying Excel all day? No. But in the field of designing 3D mechanical things, 2D mice are not the norm right now.
What makes you think it's not usable? He said it's hooked up to the software they use to design the rocket, and demoed a couple of actual parts. If rocket designers are using this stuff to visualize the rockets they're designing, how is that just a glitzy demo?
At the end, he makes the statement that this will revolutionize design and manufacturing, but I don't think that's pretty reasonable, given that Space X is in the business of design and manufacturing, not VR research.
Maybe he's not showing us everything? SpaceX competitive advantage is that they do everything in house. So he probably doesn't want to show all their capabilities. But it sure acts as a great recruiting tool.
> HN again has some depressingly negative comments.
Agreed. I feel like any time I read a Tesla article on HN, people feel the need to criticize it for the sake of "balancing the debate". I recommend just not reading the article if you're really that biased against Tesla, and not taking part in the discussion. It doesn't add anything more than a few flame wars.
Besides, isn't it nice to see something that doesn't look like Bootstrap, Foundation, etc. (name one)? I feel like if anything doesn't follow certain unspoken laws of minimalism decided by the startup gods, the UI becomes terrible by default. I've seen Heroku's redesign praised by many people on HN, but to me it just seems like a factory-stamped Bootstrap print-out. If all this "Iron Man" stuff is "been there, done that", then what about all the same sort of criticism for the umpteenth Bootstrap clone?
My comment wasn't meant to be negative - when I posted it was all gee-wiz comments with no mention of the PR angle. Read the PG essay on PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html. Elon is a master of it and it's a big part of his job. We should celebrate technologists who know how to communicate to the public and learn how to do it better ourselves.
You are right that examining pr tactics is useful and important. It's true that some groups use PR to pump out information about the same vapourware for years.
I think there's something of a cultural divide here. To me it seems like a lot of HN users have taken PG's oft quoted statement:
"At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."
And turned it into:
"Most things dismissed as toys are worth investing in."
Here's the thing, from where I'm sitting this is Light Pen Redux 2.0, as other commentators have pointed out, the system looks like a great way to induce the gorilla arm effect. Maybe there are aspects of this that SpaceX has a real use for, I'm not a rocket engineer. But I don't think it's out of line to call this what it appears to be, a PR piece.
>This particular iteration may not be interesting to you, but we're stuck with WIMP (or WIMP-lite) environments very similar to the 40 year old versions. (More colours, more animation, bigger icons, but little actual change)
Well, more colours, more animation, more GPU power, etc are enablers of very important stuff that was impossible back in the day. For example, you didn't edit live video streams, with filters applied in real time, on those 40 year old version. We also have multi-touch now.
I'n not sure about the "we're stuck" meme. It's like taking for granted that there is something entirely different for UI interaction (as opposed to incrementally better).
Well, 3D interfaces are about as old as the WIMP. And what experience has showed as those 20-30 years we experiment with them is they are not really better for a lot of stuff.
Some things are just better in a specific way -- in the way that, say, reading gives us more information density than speach or watching a video, so those can never replace it and still have that.
Or in the way that speech recognition is a nice novelty, and perhaps essential for people with hand inpedements (or with hands engaged in another activity), but it's extremely tiring for writing a blog post or input of large-ish amounts of text (as anyone who had to talk for a presentation or a class of students for an hour or more already knows).
Yeah, come on, imagine having a 3D version of your app running right in front of your face! I've been longing for this for as long as I've been a software engineer. Most systems have a pretty static architecture so they'd be easy to map into space. You could slow time down and literally watch requests coming in and bouncing right through your system. How much more intuitive would that be? Spotting patterns and finding problems would be so much easier. OK, enough day-dreaming for now but go Elon!
Perhaps we are reading too much into what he is saying. I could see his enthusiasm and hope that 3D printing and associated toolchain is going to bring to us.
It's good that there are people with the disposable income, and the engineering resources, to tinker with stuff like this.
This particular iteration may not be interesting to you, but we're stuck with WIMP (or WIMP-lite) environments very similar to the 40 year old versions. (More colours, more animation, bigger icons, but little actual change).
Kludging together desktop and mobile interfaces is being attempted (with a variety of horrible unpopular results) by many people, so it's great that other people are experimenting with other paradigms.