Personally I think that the movie Oblivion had one of the best UIs of all time. Every element placed there was animated with such a detail to transporting meaning, and wasn't there just for the show effect as most other Sci-Fi UIs. [1] I wish this UI was reality.<p>While I think Star Trek transported the idea of using touch screens everywhere, I don't think their UIs are practical, as all of them were static (except for the tablets, which only displayed texts).<p>[1] <a href="https://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX" rel="nofollow">https://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX</a>
A few observations:<p>- Film "FUIs" are almost invariably dark these days. I wonder to what extent the designers are influenced by the dark modes in the tools they use.<p>- Most of them pack enormous amounts of stuff in with tiny fonts. Probably to stop the viewer from getting distracted trying to read stuff. But there seems to be an ambient assumption that 'futuristic' stuff is way more info-packed than today's UIs are - where does that come from?<p>- Most of them over-use transparency to absurd degrees. For holograms where you want to see the actor's face it makes sense but it appears even in shots where no actors are visible, e.g. <a href="https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/florida-hospital-ui" rel="nofollow">https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/florida-hospital-ui</a><p>- A typical film FUI has a lot of animated data visualizations, but real UI almost never does. Is this because such visualizations are useless clutter or because film makers have better tools for creating them than actual programmers do?<p>The difference between "actual" FUI and film FUI is best illustrated by the concept videos produced by engineering/tech firms:<p>- <a href="https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/surface-hub2" rel="nofollow">https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/surface-hub2</a><p>- <a href="https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2017/3/21/bmw-inside-future-concept" rel="nofollow">https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2017/3/21/bmw-inside-future...</a><p>- <a href="https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2015/10/18/lg-oled" rel="nofollow">https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2015/10/18/lg-oled</a><p>We see way less detail and much more light-mode stuff.<p>I guess I'm curious how much of the gap we see between real UI and stylized/imagined UI is to do with lack of tooling, different design fashions and the different needs of film UI.
<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/top/?sort=top&t=all" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/top/?sort=top&t=all</a> is another favorite of mine. If you want an excessively deep analysis of sci-fi UIs, I suggest <a href="https://scifiinterfaces.com/" rel="nofollow">https://scifiinterfaces.com/</a><p>On a related note, does anyone have good recommendations for real-world "power UIs"? I.e, computer user interfaces that have a steep learning curve but are extremely powerful once mastered. E.g, vi/emacs or one line bash scripts + *nix CLI programs. AutoCAD/Blender and other 3D modeling tools also have good UIs once you go through the pain of mastering them and learn how to use them with one hand on a keyboard and one hand on a mouse.
These aren't "Future User Interfaces". They are UI's to look good on Film, <i>appearing</i> fancy and futuristic. Take a hologram for example, great to have a person and the thing they manipulate in the same shot. Actually working on a hologram, not so great.
Often they will have very little information on a huge surface.. while real user interfaces need to convey as much information on as little surface as possible.<p>They probably have as little value for a UI designer as a car chase in a film for a regular driver.
In my mind, The Expanse did a fantastic job with their UIs. One of the things that stood out for me was the integration between handheld and stationary devices -- for example, finding some information via personal mobile, then sharing it with others by "swiping" it onto a large stationary screen.<p>You can see that a lot of thought went into how the interactions would look like -- a lot more than usual, I'd say. Or even.. a lot more than in many actual software products! It feels like they considered it as more than just eye candy. The way information is shared / communication happens in that envisioned world seems very realistic and complete.<p>As someone who often designs user interfaces, I hold this show as one of the recent high-water marks for How To Do Things Well.
I think futuristic computer UIs in TV and films before computer graphics would make for a fascinating topic. For example, the computer UI in the BBC TV series <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i> deserves a mention.<p>The low-budget series was broadcast in 1981 - a time when computer graphics were limited and not widespread in TV and film. All the "computer graphics" were hand animated to simulate a computer display. The "computer" graphics still stands up brilliantly more than 40 years later:<p>A clip:
<a href="https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=126" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=126</a>
There are very few games that use a CLI as the primary user interaction. Duskers (2016) is one such game: you type commands into a terminal to direct dog-sized rovers as they explore derelict spaceships.<p>It might be unique among CLI games in that you can alias chains of commands together to create a new command (macro). For example there is no "begin" command in the game. `begin=open a1; navigate 1 2 a1; generator 2; status 1;` causes the airlock 1 (always between your ship and the derelict) to open, rovers 1 and 2 to navigate through airlock 1 to whatever room is on the other side, then for rover 2 to try to power on the room while rover 1 gives you the status of the room.<p>The alias feature means that when the gameplay starts feeling repetitive, you can create a command to do more of that work for you.<p>More from the developer on aliases in the game: <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/app/254320/discussions/0/528398719798517074/" rel="nofollow">https://steamcommunity.com/app/254320/discussions/0/52839871...</a>.
The issue with those fictional UIs is that who design them do not design to serve a real purpose, but to impress the public. It's like a car cockpit designed by someone who have nothing more than a limited and distorted idea about how cars are driven to impress someone who do not know how to drive either.<p>From a techie point point of view those UIs are just garbage: full of irrelevant information, confusing, completely poor of controls and interactive effectiveness. People using them act as ignorant who can't really do nothing but just touching around hoping something will happen in the direction they want to go to.<p>Even filmmakers should remember a thing: the purpose of a UI is human-device interaction, not human-device-driven-decision-making. I understand they have just to please their public and those who pay them money (witch means also pushing the public toward certain behaviors, commercially and politically nice for some film financier) but if a movie is made ONLY with those principles appeal of the movie will lower and lower, and that's probably why fan of "old" movies grow and grow every days...<p>A future UI IMVHO? Look back at Xerox UIs like <a href="http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf</a> or some experiments like SUNws PostScript Pizza tool. A document interactive UI not for passive content consumption or at maximum content selection like modern web services UIs but a UI for production and consumption at the same level without any perceived difference between the two modes, like I write as I read, I execute as I write etc. Emacs/org-mode is one the most modern UI we have alive, modern Notebook UIs are limited archaic UIs that can offer far less than Emacs but a bit more modern stuff (like proper image/video integration to a certain less bad extent), the rest? Is so advanced to be behind the early history of computer's UI, a bit advanced than the Eniac UI, but given the leap between the two Eniac in theory was more advanced anyway, just featuring a raw UI for tech limits of it's time.
It's great that these things are getting more and more realistic and less handwavy. You still see the occasional rogue AI scrolling WordPress source code on a screen but it's always a delight when little details have love and thought put into them. I even know a guy who was a chess consultant on a Hollywood film recently, to ensure they used realistic positions that weren't embarrassing on close inspection (scenes got cut though, sadly).
Looks really good ! Being a programmer and a terrible artist ! I often have to "steal"(i.e inspired) by sites like this !<p>Another good one is Game UI Databases [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.gameuidatabase.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gameuidatabase.com/</a>
Let's not forget the scene from Jurassic Park where the young female uses FSN to navigate a unix file system to save the day.<p>"I know this"<p><a href="https://youtu.be/dxIPcbmo1_U" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dxIPcbmo1_U</a>
Gotta mention <a href="https://www.pushing-pixels.org/fui/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pushing-pixels.org/fui/</a> then also as I love checking them out.