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Star Trek's Design Influence On Palm, New Tech
kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a fun article describing how many of the inventions of Star Trek have made early appearances, 2 centuries ahead of Captain Kirk's time. They talk with one of Palm's UI designers, who admits that '...my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels', and also notes: 'When we designed the first Treo... it had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series. It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk'."
What about the medical monitoring equipment McCoy had in his sick bay?
It could track heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, etc. I don't think those devices existed before Star Trek hit the air. Granted we don't have the "no-contact" versions yet (and I stress "yet") but we still have a few hundred years to perfect it.
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That's what they said when calculators, telephones, type-writers, etc. were invented. Maybe once you learn to use them they make sense?! i.e. the big red button on the top of the TV remote looks like it is random, but when you know it's the POWER button it seems to make more sense..
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I always liked it when the Star Trek crew just brushed the emblem on their uniform and started talking.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Actually, IIRC Kirk never said that in ST:TOS. He almost always said something like "Two to beam up".
and found examples of the ``Okudagrams'' since popularized on Star Trek: The Next Generation and later shows.
a rs-terminal.net/: //www.lcars-am.org/
There're a fair number of programs using such an interface (even a couple of products licensed by Paramount such as ``Captain's Bridge'' a virtual tour of all the star ships), and even a project on Sourceforge to create a programming system and UI guide (look for LCARS, Library Computer Access and Retrieval System).
I've found such programs fairly useful on my pen slate and amenable to use w/o a keyboard....
Links:
http://www.lcarscom.net/
http://www.lc
http://www.bennisoft.com/
http
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
A lot of items that have been created owe their innitial conception to some far sighted sci-fi writer, I remember with fondness a lot of the early analog's (My dad has been getting them for years) and reading some of the things they thought of, that to them were impossibilities. Yet we are starting to realise some of their dreams and make them realities. How long before our dreams become realities also? It's not something we can really place a time limitation on, but as we progress in general we get through technilogical barriers, and then make huge leaps forward. The joys of innovation.
And as a side note, lots of UI's appear difficult to use and understand, but if you understand them then it becomes easy. Take a look at the QWERTY keyboard for example. To a complete novice the keys are laid out in a random formation that does nothing to help them type. They want 'A' to be at the top and 'Z' to be at the bottom. But as they progress and learn about 'Home Keys' typing becomes a lot quicker and easier, just because a UI looks different, doesn't mean that with practice it wouldn't be a lot simpler and easier to use
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On the contrary it seems a heck of a lot more functional than typical desktop GUIs...
Every window opened full screen, important messages in large readable text, it has a very interactive feel. It gives the impression of an adaptable, efficient two dimensional interface for communicating with an embedded system. The Lines clearly delineate portions of the display of interest, the text is large enough to be seen and pressed with fingers, etc... they did put thought into the general look and feel and I think Okuda did a great job.
But generally you should just think of them as props, they in general aren't meant to be looked at up close so don't be too "upset."
Think of modern keyboard layouts: qwerty doesnt make a damned bit of sense to someone who's never used a keyboard, and often causes people to "Peck type". But once you learn the system, you can type tens-hundreds of words per minute. It's all about learning and repetition. In fact, I actually see how some of the Enterprise-D's panels work, they actually make a lot of sense of the buttons you can read, and of what you can't read, most of the time it's voice control anyways, unless you're an android or acceptionally good at entering in long keyboard commands.
Think of Palm Pilots language, then compare it to QWERTY.. you'll find that "a bunch of squigly lines not even laid out in the same direction" can be most useful...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The impact of Star Trek has been great. Star Trek is the best pseudo-science fiction TV and movie series ever. Of course, it can not be compared to true science fiction literature, which contains 100s of future inventions and gadgets. But for TV, it is the first.
Is anybody here old enough to share his/her impressions of the first Star Trek shown, back in '66 ? it would be like magic, back then. Today we consider cell phones, digital recording devices and palmtop computers as everyday reality, but back then, it must have been very jaw-dropping, to say the least.
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:)
Ahem...
That brings up an interesting thought. Perhaps if interfaces were designed to be intelligible on TV, they'd be more usable in reality, too.
Think about it. People watching the show may not know anything about computers, but they still had to understand the occasional piece of information that was important to the plot. (One good example would be when Dr. Crusher was caught in her son's experimental warp bubble. She didn't know where she really was until she saw (and the viewer) saw a picture of the "nature of the universe" and recognized it as something she (and the viewer) saw on one of Wesley's screens in Engineering.
That kind of driving force behind usability would probably be benificial to general use of computers.
Personally, though, I prefer {NeXT|OPEN}Step, GTK, or QT.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Definitely religious issues. For instance, does my soul automatically go to the new copy of my body?
Of course, the "new me" will be immediately certain its safe. Everything will seem exactly the same. Except now that I've thought about it. How will I know that I am who I was? How do I know that now?
I suppose that if you arbitrarily come up with a rule saying there can be only one person with a given set of recollections at a given religious destination for souls, then you can declare as a consequence that the soul is moved, not destroyed, or you'll have two John Does in heaven (or hell) (or purgatory) (or whatever you believe in), arguing over which one is the real one.
Wasn't there a series of episodes in one of the current sci-fi shows about that? A human who was cloned, including memories, and nobody knew who was the original? "Stick a lobster on my head" comes to mind.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Presumably they mean the UI of Picard's Enterprise. Kirk's crew seemed to be able to accomplish their tasks with approx 6 toggle switches (unlit), 4 push buttons (lit or unlit) and a couple of flashing lights each. Either that's a very powerful context sensitive UI that's had a lot of work put in to it and which requires a lot of skill to learn how to use or.... they were actually doing chuff all. The exception is Spock's scope type thing. Lot's of swirly patterns that tell him all sorts of things. Only seems to have one knob though. I can't help making observations like these when watching the original series and they almost stop be enjoying it. I also start imagining trying to live my life with this kind of UI and break out in a cold sweat.
"This is crazy, you realise we could all go to jail for this?" - my manager, somewhere I used to work.
It is.
I took apart a keyboard to turn it into a "Star Trek" keyboard - no buttons, you just touched spots on plastic - which is basically what a keyboard is underneath the buttons.
I didn't even get all the way and it was annoying as hell - it was quite responsive when you touched the right spot on the plastic, but when not staring at the keyboard there was no feedback - no feel of the buttons to tell you where your hands were located, since it was all a smooth plastic film, and you lost the tactile feedback from pushing the button and knowing it was pushed.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
. . . that a full-featured Holodeck would be the *last* thing that Man ever invents?
As someone else in the thread has noted, the Holodeck was a really problematical thing to add to the series.
The fact that it figured in so many episodes is evidence of either a), that the producers don't find the idea of exploring new worlds all that interesting, or b) that they're unimaginative hacks who can't make space exploration interesting.
The ultimate irony: The VERY FIRST Star Trek story, "The Cage" AKA "The Managerie," was about a decadent civilization whose people spent their time living out their fantasies via telepathic thought records.
Stefan
When I inprocessed into the US Army in 1989, the immunizations they gave to everyone were administered by medics using what looked and sounded like an airgun.
And yeah, if you flinched, it hurt...I think it had to do with the airstream being angled instead of straight down. The good medics would walk by, tap you on the arm with the tip of the gun to make you flinch, then do it again right after you'd flinched, and fire.
I'm not sure if the air was used to carry the medicine, or just accelerate it. It'd guess just accelerate it, since blowing air under someone's skin strikes me as being unsafe for some reason. }:)
Here in Australia, our new combat "Collins" class subs had a user interfce designed by committee. It took 13 button presses to designate a target and launch a torpedo. The generals, when assessing this new sub, complained that the UI in a Playstation game to at most three clicks to designate a target and launce; why can't a multi-billion dollar sub work like that.
The contractor then employed some game UI designers to rewrite the combat system.
It's a true story! I don't have tome to search for the reports now, but it should be available on www.smh.com.au or www.theaustralian.com.au.
Instead of trying to wrap he human being around the technology, the imagineers of Star Trek just guessed what the optimal machine-human interface would be: talking computers, palm size commnication and medical devices, etc. Where a device name did not exist, they just turned the verb-action into the name; scanner, transporter, etc. Hopefully the details of our technologies will disappear into the optimal machine-human interfaces also.