Robert Tiltons application is almost everything Musk seems to have done, except the lack of interfacing with CAD software (for example gesture based modification).
The other 2 links are, whilst only tangentially related, really cool, so I thought I'd post them as well.
So really, the question isn't "Why didn't it exist yet?" it's "Why was Elon's system featured on thenextweb, and Roberts wasn't?"
And that's where we disagree.
To me that's the very definition of groundbreaking.