The best bit is the anecdote about LCARS in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was all due to a budget shortfall:<p>"Star Trek also may have helped create the entire image-under-glass paradigm that governs our digital world. The interface, known as LCARS, is cool-looking. It’s distinctive. And it’s actually the result of a budget shortfall.<p>Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t have as much money for set design as did the original series, which had panels wired with jewels and glowing buttons. Instead, they cut out film and put them over glass panes."<p>It's usually constraints, not the lack of them, that give birth to true innovation.
"Consider the MicroTAC, one of Motorola’s first cell phones. It did not sell well."<p>It was nothing to do with the MicroTAC being £3,000? No, it was the direction of the flip. Right.<p>The later MicroTACs with LCD sold loads. At the time, most people seemed to <i>prefer</i> them to the early StarTAC.
What a stupid statement: <i>"blue is so rare in nature (if you discount the sky and the ocean ..."</i><p>Of course the Blue Planet isn't blue if you remove all that makes it blue...
Maybe assisted by the Orange & Blue bias in film colouring, <a href="http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange-and-blue/" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange...</a>
While I'm sure we can learn lots from science fiction, some designs imposed by fictionary authors are while looking cool, super impractical. Blue screens are one of the impractical designs: if I were to stare at blue colors all day, I think would get a headache more quickly. I'm super greatfull for Apple's true tone display, that makes reading on my iPad much better and night shift is also a feature I've long missed enough. It think we should rather focus on our environment to know what we need to improve interfaces. Science fiction movies sometimes do that for us.<p>But regarding blue screens: the less blue and the more yellow (or other warm colors), the better.
We seem to have gotten over the obsession with blue LEDs that was wildly popular around 10 years ago, when almost every device had blindingly bright blue LED indicators or decorative lighting.
> <i>And that is one of the many design lessons we can learn from sci-fi</i>.<p>I'm sorry, but whoever wrote this knows absolutely nothing about design. Or worse, is the type of visual designer who treats usability like an afterthought and thinks aligning with whatever is <i>fashionable</i> is an indicator of quality.<p>None of the design decisions made in those examples reflect the needs of someone using a machine. It reflects the needs of a TV-series of movie to have cheap props that fit their narrative of exposition and drama, as well as the budget restrictions.
> Well, what if the sound is the interface? Audio is a much more efficient gauge of surroundings, since it spans 360 degrees, whereas vision only covers 120 degrees. It might be that there are sensors on the outside of the Millennium Falcon that provide 3D sound inside the gunner seat. So when we hear ships blow up, we’re actually hearing an augmented reality interface that Luke and Han hear. Maybe?<p>The game Terminus took that approach. The game had a bunch of settings that let you get "arcade-like" physics and appearance of space, but the manual explained that this was provided by the ships on-board computer systems to make it more intuitive for people to fly them.<p>You could opt to "turn off" all the enhancements, such as moving starfields, bright nebulas serving effectively as markers to help orient yourself, "outside sound" etc., up to and including "computer assisted" firing of navigational rockets (so that rotating the ship would start changing direction by automatically firing rockets vs. being able to rotate the ship while continuing in the original direction)
Isn't this a subset of <a href="http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange-and-blue/" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange...</a> ?
There's a significant difference between an interface which looks good as a feature of a scene, and an interface that looks good / is functional when it is occupying your entire attention..
They missed the fact that the "make it so" context aware button already exists. Your average Playstation controller has at least 4 that do different functions depending on the context.<p>Modern TV remotes have also long drifted in that direction with the four color buttons that change use depending on what screen you are on.
I'm skeptical there's anything going on here other than an overwhelming trend in film to make everything that needs to be visually distinctive be blue. <a href="http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange-and-blue/" rel="nofollow">http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange...</a>
What always strikes me is how uniform the appearance of screens is in SF films. When I look at my own screens, I see various applications that have all made different choices, within the bounds imposed by the GUI itself. An old app doesn't magically get new design styles. Old Windows XP apps, for example, may look odd when run on a Windows 7 system. Apparently, in the future, not only is everything blue, but the platforms they use have very rigid design rules that are strictly enforced.
This was one of the things I loved so much about Android's Holo UI. It LOOKED LIKE THE FUTURE.<p>I will probably never love a software UI as much as I loved Android 3.0-4.1.
A theory:<p>Good Sci-Fi movies are smart and interesting, they appeal to the mind. Thus they use a cold, cerebral color. If they were about emotions, like a Rom-Com, they would use a warm, comforting color.
One of the most aesthetically "future proof" movies is probably 2001: A Space Odyssey. Compare Star Wars, released almost a decade later, and how the Stormtrooper armor looks dated (at least to me): <a href="http://i.imgur.com/sLhv0LJ.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/sLhv0LJ.png</a><p>This is a great related essay: "HAL, Mother, and Father: Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien." <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-and-father/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-and...</a>
"Noessel posits that, because blue is so rare in nature there’s something fundamentally mystical, unnatural, and inhuman about it."<p>This is strange. First the ocean and the sky look blue. So regardless of whether they are, they are.<p>Second, there are blue flowers, blue birds, blue fish, blue eyes, blueberries, Kentucky Bluegrass, Blue Heelers, and Blue Tick Hounds. It doesn't seem more rare to me than red or yellow. Green is everywhere. But blue doesn't seem rare to me.<p>It is the second most common color in flags (behind red) for a reason.<p>it is the second most common color in logos for a reason.
I love the interfaces in the movie Oblivion: <a href="https://vimeo.com/64377100" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/64377100</a>
You mean they don't choose a yellow-on-white emphasis with matching yellow highlight color?
/snark<p>I really thought the blue-histograms over the years was super cool.<p>What happened in 1991 where it suddenly became RED?
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/</a><p>Terminator 2: Judgement Day - the interface from Arnold's point of view was a RED overlay.<p>Which, one might consider an invalid sample as it was not meant to represent a human-computer-interface but in fact, an Android interface.<p>Anyways, great article!
What I love the most about that videophone sequence is the little girl asking for a phone for her birthday. Here we are, living in the future, and what do kids want for their birthdays? Phones.
How about the overwhelming blue/orange cast in movies?<p>Or the fact that old terminals were green (thus not futuristic) and red is damn hard to read.
That's a lot of analysis for something that some art directors just decided to go with because it looked good, or spring boarded from previous designs...
re "make-it-so button" - I have that button, too. It's labelled "git push", and Makes It So for all sorts of different things ;)