Elon Musk is just a flying metal suit short of becoming comic book hero Tony Stark.
The SpaceX founder and innovative genius has unveiled a series of futuristic designs, the latest of which seems fitting for a real-life Iron Man . Musk and the other engineers at SpaceX just unveiled plans to combine a gesture-sensing controller, virtual reality headset, and a 3D printer to create a system that lets engineers create designs with their bare hands.
Elon Musk said the Iron Man -worthy invention allows users to “really apply your intuition and take something from your mind to a physical object with far greater ease than we currently do.”
SpaceX just released a video of a user moving around and through a 3D object, but so far they don’t seem to have the capability to create new parts or manipulate existing ones.
The system looks a lot like the way Tony Stark modifies his exoskeleton in the Iron Man movies, and Elon Musk says that’s intention. In a tweet to director Jon Favreau last month, Musk said he used Iron Man as the inspiration for the manipulation system.
Elon Musk also has Tony Stark’s entrepreneurial spirit and mind for innovation. Musk had led the electric car company Tesla from obscurity to the forefront of the car industry, with its electric car just netting perfect crash test score.
Musk also has plans for a nationwide system of high-speed travel called the Hyperloop , one that uses a series of tubes to transport cars across the country.
“This system I have in mind, how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train,” Elon Musk said of the Hyperloop. “It goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport.”
Now all Elon Musk needs is the Iron Man suit to complete his transformation into Tony Stark.