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Designing the Computer UIs In Movies
xandroid points out an NPR interview with Mark Coleran, who
"...designs the fancy-but-fake graphics that flash across computers in the movies. He has worked on a laundry list of blockbusters: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum, Children of Men, Mission Impossible III, and many more. He says a lot of the inspiration for computer screens comes from video games." The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
Does he also make those fancy monitors that project what is on the screen out into the room and onto any passing dinosaur?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
And what story is that? That computers in the future are shiny and pretty if not outright magical?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
This wouldn't be a problem but it is part of a general tendency in Hollywood to favor looks cool and quickly understandable over accurate. This is understandable. But, it does lead to serious problems. This has lead for example to the general problem(called the CSI effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect after the television show) that juries now often have ideas about what forensic scientists can do that have little to do with reality. This also happens simply with less knowledgable people interacting with computers. And the subject of this interview is apparently to blame. I have had some experience helping older people with computers where they seem genuinely confused about what computers can do, or what you can use computers to do. And when they have major misconceptions the misconceptions inevitably are of a form that one would get from seeing a TV show or movie.
Movie/TV interface design peaked with LCARS.
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All these fake OS in various movies, from Wargames to Jurassic Park to Star Trek, and beyond, are all powered by Ninnle Linux. It's so flexible, it can be made to look like any other OS, not to mention something completely different. Ninnle is the way of the future!
The Viewer Friendly Interface trope was (surprisingly) largely averted in the Matrix where only a little Hollywood was wrapped around an almost unmodified nmap and sshnuke.
Last I heard (back when TechTV was still going) the majority of the UIs are done with Stardock.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works. Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology, which still remains a set of magic boxes for the lay man.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
As a IT guy I hate being asked by a lay person "Do you understand what he's doing on that screen?" when we're watching some movie or TV show with a completely fake UI on some computer.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
In the 90s, with the OO( Object Oriented ) Workplace Shell on OS/2, a company called Stardock Systems came up with a great desktop enhancing package( Object Desktop ) which I'd heard was also being used to build screens for the film industry. It really made an OS/2 desktop pop and back then, only the NextStep UI can close to the default WPS. I don't think anything came close to what Stardock did with the WPS using their desktop extension Object Desktop.
The article could have went into what they use and what they've used. It was pretty shallow without that info IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I imagine how tough if would be to make a scene interesting if they showed Kevin Mitnik typing into a korn shell.
This for the ones who think Movie-OS interfaces are cool and slick looking: They're not efficient, they're not sensible, they are not intuitive and most of all, they're not useable.
I often run into people who ask me "Why isn't this or that program designed like that one in this or that movie". Because it would not be usable. A few examples how Movie-OS interfaces are very, very poorly designed, from a usability point of view.
1) They're slow. Cue CSI fingerprint patching program. The program displays every single failed compare in quick flash forward display. Pulling the whole dataset from the database and rendering it takes time. This time is wasted. You would not want your program to do that.
2) Hard to reach buttons. Unfortunately, Knight Rider is the only example that comes to my mind right now, but it's true for far too many movies. Buttons located overhead, out of reach, sometimes requiring the user/pilot to stop doing whatever he is doing right now, move his hands and punch a minuscle button somewhere awkward. Yes, it looks cool, but it's about as sensible as putting the gear stick behind the driver's seat.
3) 100" see through displays. Again CSI (but it's made its way into various other movies by now). Yes, we all want bigger displays. Bigger is better. But there's a limit to better. Especially if, as in CSI, the additional space is not used to present more information but just to display the information in larger font or to fill it with more pointless gimmicky pictures. The angle your eye can see sharp in and can easily catch is very tiny. The diameter of the screen has to be viewable by moving your eyes alone and without strain, or it can just as well be accessible by scrolling.
4) Lifted-hands interface. Lacking a better term I dubbed it that: An interface that does not allow your hand to rest but requires you to lift them and reach. First of all, it's inaccurate. You are moving your hand from your shoulder instead of your wrist, which does limit your accuracy quite a bit. It's straining and tiring. Especially when you're supposed to hit tiny icons, this is magnitudes worse than traditional input.
5) Touch input. While we're at it. Touch input becomes so popular in cellphones that EVERYTHING has to be touch input now. In case you didn't notice: It's popular because you have the input device in your palm. Now put it upright like a computer screen and tell me how convenient, comfortable or accurate it is. Not to mention that you're covering the info you try to access with your fingers, which means that you will have to lift your hand to see what you're doing. It's comfortable for quick input, but not for constant use.
Basically, Movie-OS interfaces look cool and dramatic, and that's what they're good for. They are not good for use.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember being slightly irked by computer scenes in 80's movies: while showing a person typing command line text, the displayed text was revealed at a constant rate, probably about that of a 150 baud modem. The appearance is vastly different than that of someone actually typing.
Same with early attempts at showing GUI use - constant, linear movements of the cursor.
I suspect that the problem came from lack of the computer / tech equivalent of a 'sound guy'. No way would a sound engineer allow an otherwise well-made movie to be released with out of sync, or unnatural spoken word.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Read the Movie OS arc at userfriendly.org, starting here: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010111
Usually when I see one of these computer screens the absurdity is quite distracting - often because it looks like a computer game and not software being used by highly skilled professionals at work. Actually that's a bit unfair, most games' UI is and looks much more usable. It doesn't help when the script calls for software that apparently comes with a button simply labelled "magically solve your problem".
The movie Antitrust was pretty realistic and accurate. The computer interface that was shown was Gnome. Even the lines of code that were displayed had been borrowed from Open source projects. Maybe that is because the producers listen to professional consultant (among which there was de Icaza). I am sure there are other examples of good UI, but indeed they are a minority.
The difference between movie UIs and real UIs is actually, in many respects, pretty similar to the difference between movie plots and real life (lack of) plots.
Real UIs always have a strongly generic character, because they are usually rather multipurpose(and even the fairly strongly single-purpose ones, industrial inventory systems and such, are often just special cases of horribly general enterprise stacks, hacked together by hacks for economic reasons). They have to expose a great many of the system's features because they have no way of knowing which ones the user is going to want. Movie UIs can be highly specific, without any visible provision for doing anything other than what is happening at that very moment; because they exist only for the purposes of the story. A particularly driven production team might want to make them look more generic, just to enhance the verisimilitude of the world by making it seem less wrapped around the story; but that is very much optional.
This is analogous to how movie plots work. In a movie, everything that happens, every character who exists, all accidents of fate, and so forth, is there by design, in order to advance the plot. There might be red herrrings, specifically to throw the audience off, or generic extras, to make things look realistic; but everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot. In real life, things just exist, probabilities are settled by chance. Only teleologists and the mentally ill are aware of a grand design being served.
Evil Guy: You will now wire 1 gazillion dollars to my account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
... >
Noob: Ok, whatever you say, >
Evil Guy: I have won! I am a Gazillionaire! There is nothing you can do to stop me now
Noob: Oh, Nooooooooo! Release my daughter/wife/boyfriend!
Evil Guy: I have the money already, I'll just shoot them instead
Noob: No, I'll come crashing through the wall in a hail of bullets and stop you
*** Meanwhile, back in the real world! ***
Evil Guy: Send me the money...blah blah blah.
Actual Real Person: OK, here you go
Evil Guy: I have the money now, you get nothing
Actual Real Person (with FBI/Interpol agent): No, you have nothing but an entry on a computer screen. Gov't just froze those Assets and you don't even know it. Now, where is my daughter/wife/boyfriend whatever.
Negotiation begins...
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
UI doesn't matter, but unlimited zoom must be there!
Guilty or not, he's on on my hit-list, right below the pope.
Smoke a spliff, maybe throw some Bob Marley on the stereo and chill out, man.
depends on the show. a lot of scifi is done with flash based overlay's. Or more common when using "video phone" stuff is a green screen to be filled in later.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I am sure you have seen it, when the characters watch a security video of something you saw earlier and apparently security camera's are on dolly's, move about and cut automatic to new shots for the most exciting action...
Although my worsed still is Jurassic Park, a time line underneath a live conversation...
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Personally I liked how the character of Trinity used nmap to find a host with a vulnerable version of SSH (along with the SSHv1 CRC32 vulnerability). Nmap has actually been in a few movies:
http://nmap.org/movies.html
Not "why is everything a crutch to the story" but "why does the story NEED to rely upon fantasy crutches".
Why did the writer write the story so that it NEEDED a fantasy UI for a computer? Why not some other crutch? One that is more realistic?
The answer is, of course, simple. The writers don't know anything except how to get a job writing for Hollywood. Therefore, ANYTHING that they put in the story will be their personal interpretation of systems that they probably only know through other Hollywood movies written by writers just like them.
Which is one of the reasons why we get so much crap out of Hollywood.
So you obviously never hacked using the ultimate hacker tool uplink. You should try! there you see how realistic most movies are, unlike most of the hacking tools YOU lamers use...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I think it is an example of how our desktop environments are failing us though. My eeepc and my hp laptop both run ubuntu 8.10 with gnome. When both are connected to my wifi I should be able to slide my mouse off the left side of the HP screen onto the eeepc, and drag files as I go.
Try Synergy to share keyboard and mouse via software and network between computers that have their own display. You might be able to copy and paste files with the unified clipboard.
If you watch TV or movies, you see this with virtually any subject you could imagine. What it boils down to is that generally the people making the content need to dumb down everything to what Joe Average expects to see. If you've got greater-than-average knowledge of any field, chances are when you see people doing it on TV they're fucking something up.
We've already heard countless examples of computer GUIs. How about medicine? I was a paramedic, and my wife is an ER doc, and both of us cringe every time we see someone onscreen get a giant needle stabbed into their chest. Ever since Uma got the treatment in Pulp Fiction (maybe there were earlier ones, but that's the first time I remember seeing it) this is a great little dramatic moment that they love to stick into films and TV shows. In real life drugs go into a vein and even if the heart isn't going you can circulate with a little CPR. Jamming giant needles into the heart is just silly.
And while we're on the subject, all the CPR I see onscreen is shit. The last time I was certified was 2005 so I might be out of date, but last I checked we were at 30:2 compression/breath ratio at a rate of about 100 compressions per minute. Our memory aid was that we could compress to the tune of Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' (funny, I know) and that would get us pretty close. On TV it's way too slow, not to mention pretty rare that 30 seconds of CPR will magically revive someone without the addition of a defibrillator and lots of drugs.
I don't know dick about car repair, but I know what to do if I'm in a movie. I ask the hot chick on the side of the road to pop the hood, I stick my head in there, jiggle a few wires, then say, "Try it now." Then it'll start right up. Or possibly blow up, depending on the movie. Oh, and if you need to hotwire a car, you just yank that bundle of wires out from under the dash and tap a couple of them together until it sparks.
How about firearms? Again, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure when you shoot someone with a 9mm it won't knock them off their feet and throw their body 10 feet backwards through a plate glass window. But it sure looks nifty.
General electronics? It doesn't really matter what you're doing here; defusing a bomb, fixing a broken radio, breaking into a vault, etc. You just open up whatever device you're dealing with, connect a few jumpers with alligator clips on the end, clip another wire with a set of cutters and poof, you're golden. Just don't cut the green wire. Or was it the blue wire?
I'm sure most people could come up with similar things they see all the time, these are just a few of the ones that I notice. I probably gloss over lots more simply because for those subjects, I am the Joe Average and whatever they're doing looks totally plausible to me even though someone somewhere is gnashing their teeth over it.
I still wanna sue movies for giving me unremovable fantasies about 3-breasted green babes.
Table-ized A.I.
Quite a number of movies and TV shows use Apple ][ assembler dumps for various computer-related activities; I imagine the intent in those cases is to present something which looks both cryptic and meaningful.