Is Elon Musk the Tony Stark of real-life?  He could be, especially if you consider all his ingenious, though sometimes a bit quirky, innovative spirit.

Stark is a genius, billionaire, playboy, philantropist that is more famously known as Iron Man.  He is not real of course, he is a fictional Marvel character that geeks and non-geeks alike grew to love and hate in comic books and movies.  He has these cool inventions, like JARVIS, a transparent smartphone, the Iron Man suit, and holographic technology that allows him to create new suit designs, weapons or even to closely examine parts.

The holographic technology used in the movies are so cool that it beats the one shown in Minority Report.  The holographic technology in the Iron Man movies make it feel so life-like that the Start is able to “hold” the holograms, move them around, take pieces apart and so on.  So when will we be able to see this happening in real life?

If Musk’s tweets are to be believed, it’s already happening and we could see a video coming out anytime this week.

We figured out how to design rocket parts just w hand movements through the air (seriously). Now need a high frame rate holograph generator.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2013

Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2013

Musk is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors so it’s not really surprising that he would be the one to make the holographic technology seen in the Iron Man movies come to life.

But Musk isn’t the only one working on making holographic technology a common household item.

Holocube HC40

The 2013 release of the Holocube features a new LED backlight display with 1080p resolution and a 178º viewing angle that makes the display much crisper and life-like.  It also has a new sheet metal housing that is available in matte white or matte black, plus synthetic optics that would make products featured in this holographic cube stand out.  Aimed at brands so they can better advertise their products, but if you’ve got cash to burn and just want this as your new toy, no one’s stopping you.

Holho

There’s a new Kickstarter project that aims to revolutionize how people see things on their smartphones or tablets.  Dubbed as the Holho, it is a hologram generator for mobile devices.  It can be a small pyramid that can be placed on top of your smartphone screen to project holographic images or bigger so it can project images from a 10” tablet.  It doesn’t actually do much aside from projecting images, you can’t interact with the images so it’s just a different way for you to enjoy images on your device. Here’s another catch, you can’t project any image you want.  It needs to be created with the Holho app so it can be projected on the special screen.  Plus, when you place the Holho device on top of your mobile device, you can’t use your device.  It still has 28 days to go to reach its $58K funding goal on Kickstarter and it already raised more than $22K when this piece was written.  I guess rendering your device useless for some time just to be able to stare at a holographic image is interesting for a lot of people.

AquaTop Display

Researchers at the Graduate School of Information Systems at the University of Electro-Communications in Japan, developed a way of turning a tub of water into an interactive display screen with the use of a projector and a Kinect sensor.  Though this may seem like it’s not holographic technology, the fact that it does away with a conventional touchscreen and allow you to move objects by scooping water with the palm of your hands, or deleting things by grabbing them and pulling them underwater, makes it similar in some ways.