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How Star Trek Artists Imagined the iPad... 23 Years Later
MorderVonAllem submitted an incredibly cool article about the computers and set design of Star Trek. If you are into that sort of thing, you're going to really like this one. It says "There are a lot of similarities between Apple's iPad and the mobile computing devices—known as PADDs—used in the Star Trek universe. Ars spoke to designers Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler to find out the thinking and inspiration behind the PADD and how closely the iPad represents a real-life incarnation of that dream."
I thought this was Slashdot: Source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues
Not Apple HQ.
The PADDs similar tablets in general, not just Apples iPad.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Cool story, bro.
Except for, you know, The long freaking history section of Tablet PC's on Wikipedia
'nuff said
Why can't
I'd be willing to bet most of the engineers working on the iPad were Star Trek fans. Consciously or subconsciously, seeing how they were used on Star Trek inspired them. It's the same way cell phones operated a lot like communications. The Okudas should ask for royalty payments.
Prior Art!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
These PADDS also don't run Flash.
I knew it! Jobs just tried to literally copy this whole PADD concept.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The article is wrong. i am almost dead certain that last PADD image comes from an early DS9 episode, where everyone gets aphasia and O'Brien tries to communicate with Bashir by writing.
FAIL!
is that iPad technology was stolen from aliens.
Yours In Baikonur,
K. Trout
I dunno, it seems to me the iPad and the PADD aren't particularly analogous. iPads are interactive application frameworks; PADDs were usually only used exactly the same way paper is - "look at this data from Omicron Persei 8!" *hands it over. *Reads. "My god. The borometric field is fluctuating!" You rarely saw data uploaded to a PADD and you never saw it running complex applications or interacting with the world; that's what Tricorders were for.
A PADD was a clipboard, just future-visioned. It served exactly the same purpose, plot-wise, as all the paper in the new Battlestar Galactica being octagonal - it show you you were in a different world.
How many /. readers don't actually read arstechnica. The general overlap in interest is pretty huge. And, not that it's any real metric, ars has more followers on facebook than /. (Hopefully this is linked to privacy concerns)
Mod parent 'advert', plz.... again. ._.
.."How MorderVonAllem Imagined The Girlfriend... 40 Years Later."
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I like looking at old sci-fi movies and think 20 years ago this was impossible now we actually have that. I remember as a kid watching star trek and thinking that's would be so cool.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
There's a Paul Dourish article kicking around the explores how ubicomp research often parallels sci-fi: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/tmp/puc-scifi-draft.pdf That we'd end up developing things we perceived as futuristic and cool when we were young is kinda obvious when you think about it.
...if they'd imagined it 23 years earlier.
What a great concept for an interface. (Stick in all of the usual superlatives and adjectives like immersive, sharable, networkable, topographically deep display and interaction technology. ISNTDDIT [from the John Brunner school of neologism. {See "EngLReySattelServ". }])
Ultimately, I'd like to see something able to sense our reaching into a hologram which is projecting a synthetic image.
F&^* the mouse and my flat screens.
This would rock...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
When I can casually toss it onto my desk like Picard without worrying about the thing shattering, it will have officially replaced books.
less space than a nomad... lame.
There's an episode (Voyager, I think) where crew are handed out single letters from home on a PADD. Looks like their hard disks were really, really small.
I always just took it as a given that the PADD was a large part of the inspiration behind the iPad. I mean, even the name pays homage. I can easily envision someone like Steve Jobs sitting down with a designer and some episodes of ST:TNG and saying "Now make me on of those".
It's pretty apparent that the set designers on ST:TNG were visionaries. It's pretty difficult to accurately envision the future, even if it's only 20 years ahead of time. Credit needs to be given to those guys. I just hope that Apple had the decency to give them free iPads when they were released.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
really. I just RTFA, smoke Jobhova's cock much Ars?
It hasn't been 23 years since the iPad came out, and the article says "23 years ago" anyway.
The iPad is EXACTLY what the PADD would have been had the Ferengi designed it instead of someone in the Federation.
1. Geological
2. Meteorological
3. Biological
I can't predict the future, but I'm quite sure Steve's Job's brain, submerged in a nutrient-rich emulsion, will be wheeled out at the 2200 WWDC to announce the new iPad.
"Grr! iPad sales aren't increasing fast enough for me to buy my eighth solid gold yacht! And why don't I dominate the world yet? These extra black turtlenecks won't sell themselves, people! Quick, iLackey! Post some bullshit story to Slashdot to drum up more iPad hype! Make sure you get it out when CmdrTaco's on duty! He'll publish anything praising Apple!"
Perhaps it depends on the level at which you judge things. For me, for something to "resemble an iPad," it needs to have a third party inserted between the developer and the user.
Geordi: "Hey, what if we reroute The Borg's root command through the subspace neutrino beam? Their ship will collapse like a house of balloons!"
Riker: "Checkmate!"
Picard: "Mr. Data, make it so."
Data: "Aye aye, captain." [fingers blur on PADD, then stop. Data just sits there.]
Picard: "Mr. Data?"
Data: "Yes, captain?"
Picard: "Are you ready?!"
Data: "Waiting for software approval by the Ferengi, sir."
Picard: *sigh* "Initiate auto-destruct sequence."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Two words: gorilla arm.
It's amazing how much you can 'predict' given nearly a quarter century of hindsight. Not to mention that much of this technology is older than Okuda & Co. would have you believe.
I saw my first flat screen display with software configurable buttons in 1982, as this was the interface used to operate the simulation computers that drove the trainers for the MK88/2 and MK98/0 (Trident Backfit and Trident-I respectively) missile fire and launch control systems. (Though the screens were activated via a stylus rather than true touch screens.) The systems weren't new even then, they were at least six years old. (And thus designed even earlier.) For that matter, the many of the 'buttons' on the fire control console themselves (whose design dates to the early/mid 1970's) were actually miniaturized slide projectors that could display different messages under software control. Heck, the MK88/1 Poseidon system could (under software control) display different colors on a single button (though not different message text as the 88/2 and 98 could) as far back as the late 60's.
There's also sonar and torpedo fire control equipment from the same (early 70's) era with software configurable interfaces.
For that matter, as early as my VIC-20, the buttons on the keyboard could do various things depending on the software that was running at the time.
So Amok Time was about about Kirk calling Spock a fanboy and that's why he went ape?!?
Wow, did I misunderstand that one! Hands back card and accompanying plastic Tricorder. *shame*.
"Make it look more like the Mac."
The PADD is just the display portion of the iPad.
It would have come as a very great surprise to people in the 80s how microelectronics have changed the face what is actually possible.
The limitations of the iPad are ones of the physical limitations of human being holding them.
Your arms are only so strong, so long and so jointed.
The electronics and computing power we can cram into those dimensions may grow as Moore's Law continues apace but our arms and our eyes aren't going to change.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's always been a pretty obvious idea. Until a decade or so ago it was a bit too pricey and until Apple actually produced one with enough marketing push and App store infrastructure to make people actually want them.
Note the early appearance of an iPad concept in Demolition Man
It will be just like the eye phone but will be larger, and not have the phone.
Maybe Al wouldn't have needed to beat on Ziggy all the time on Quantum Leap if he wouldn't cover up the antenna with his cigar hand.
...the real smoking gun would have been a TOS episode titled "I, Padd".
(This is bogus. Why did I bother posting this?)
You know star trek seems to be the source for a lot of design patterns used in technology from a cell phone (communicator) to the ipad, to this and that, i wonder when it comes time to start teleporting if we will adapt the same hardware setup as they did in the transporter room? Seriously, did you know teleporting will be the next wheel or sliced bread invention, if we can get it right....imagine being able to teleport all cancer cells from your body, leaving behind healthy tissue, or teleporting from us to china in a blink of an eye, you could commute to japan for work almost everyday...limitations would be overcome in so many aspects of life and varying industries!
I really don't think Apple took any inspiration from Star Trek.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
All the iPad needs is a transparent aluminum screen, and you can toss it around all you want. (:-)
Twenty Three years later than what? Maybe you mean 23 years *after* Stanley Kubrick envisioned the iPad in 1968 for the movie 2001?
Stanley was off by only 9 years, a pretty good prediction, and unlike Star Trek, which almost never showed anything on the PADD, in 2001, the characters are shown watching full-screen, wirelessly streamed video to the tablet.
Frankly, the PADD was a easy device to envision, especially since you see Kirk dealing with essentially the same device in almost every TOS episode (It's a clipboard with lights).
And for some reason, the best part about TOS was gone from every Rick Berman Star Trek that followed: the background jibber-jabber on the bridge, that stuff about "gravity is down to point-eight" that is heard to make the bridge sound like there's A LOT going on... All the other bridges are dead-quiet, even the "earlier" NX-01 Enterprise.
Anyhow; Point is: Nothing new under the sun, and, to anyone who keeps his eyes open, this stuff has been around since long before ST:TNG, it's just that the internet kiddies only remember TNG because that's what *they* grew up with.
Now Get Off My Lawn.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I haven't removed apple section from my preferences to see the shitfest spreading into other sections. Please keep apple stories in Apple section.
"Ultimately, I'd like to see something able to sense our reaching into a hologram which is projecting a synthetic image."
Manipulating the graphics based on sensing and tracking your motion we can do now, it's the whole creating a hologram without spinning mirrors or suspended projection media that poses the problem, not to mention the user blocking the projection.
But I digress, I really just wanted to point out that the interface you describe was shown in the first Iron Man movie when Stark is developing the new version of his suit at his home lab. He displays the mechanical frame design for the suit forearm then reaches into the holographic image and "wears" it, rotating his arm with the hologram matching his movement.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
only applicable if the screen is at a close to 90 degree angle vs the desk its resting on. get it down to below 45 and the problem goes away (tho i wonder why apple had to apply for a patent on their ipad case design).
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Rationalizing Treknology is a tradition as old as the Internet. You wouldn't think of denying someone their fun, now, would you?
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline." - Frank Zappa
i kinda expected everyone here to know the similarity, and thought of it as something not worth mentioning :)
I agree with the article that TOS set designer did a good job overall. But there were definitely elements of the design that were not very forward-looking. Spock had a MECHANICAL COUNTER at his station!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
They were more like paper cheap.
Doctor was signing and giving away PADDs loaded with a hologram of him singing in Virtuoso.
And you can often see characters using several PADDs when researching something - as one would do with notepads as opposed to what one might do with a notebook.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Prior Art!
The theatrical prop is prior art only for the patent on the theatrical prop. It is - after all - only a safe, practical, and economical way of sustaining the illusion.
The secret to Goldin's [1920] illusion lies in the construction of his apparatus. The audience watches a stage assistant climb into a large box resting on a platform. What it does not see is that the platform is actually a second box, in which another assistant is concealed. At some point during the illusion, the bottom of the first box, from which the first assistant's feet protrude, is temporarily hidden, either by rotating the apparatus on stage or by nonchalantly blocking that end of it with a panel or prop. The first assistant takes this opportunity to withdraw her feet and retract her body into the upper half, where built-in footrests ensure that she will remain in one piece. The second assistant then pushes her feet--clad, of course, in an identical pair of shoes--through the vacated holes and scrunches down in the bottom end of the box.
When the performer starts to saw, the audience seems to see the blade penetrate the body of the woman. In fact, it is passing harmlessly between two assistants. Once the sawing is complete and the two halves of the box, after being pulled apart to heighten the illusion, are pushed back together, the substitution process is reversed; the first assistant's feet are again extended through the lower end of the box, and she is able to emerge in one piece.
The exposure of his secret forced Goldin to abandon his sawing illusion. In its place he developed "The Living Miracle," in which an assistant is cut in half by a giant circular saw. Unlike his original sawing illusion, however, the assistant is not enclosed in a box; rather, the sawing is performed in full view of the audience. The method used to accomplish the illusion, which was never patented, is still known only to a select few.
Today his sawing apparatus remains a staple of stage magicians around the globe, while the circular-saw illusion is used only by top performers, such as David Copperfield and Harry Blackstone, Jr.
Audiences may not know Horace Goldin's name, but among magicians he will always be remembered as the man who created one of the profession's sturdiest illusions and failed in attempting to protect it. In so doing he made clear both the power and the limits of America's patent system. For a while that system served Goldin well, as it has many other inventors. In the end, however, he asked it to do something it simply was not designed for, and like any human contrivance similarly misused, the system did not respond the way he wanted.
Sawing A Woman In Half
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Padd#General_Specifications
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual states that Starfleet PADDs are powered by sarium krellide power cells, and have an outer casing of boronite whisker epoxy, which would allow the PADD to sustain a 35-meter drop without damage.
Basically, you could use a PADD as a hammer and still write your report on it later.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
TAMMPON?
Dur hur hur dur hur dur hur. Lulz pwned L33tfag - signed, Sarah Palin's genetic disaster-baby (gotta catch-em all!)
most likely increased their creativity. I would bet if they had a large budget then the PADD would have not been as visionary.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Trek also predicted g0atse when Spock looked into that secret glowing box and went nuts.
Table-ized A.I.
Same reason I keep a note pad next to the keyboard when programming: I'm faster when I can glance at something instead of switching windows.
I do hope in the next 500 years though they come-up with something better though. Pinch and move a-la iPad is neat, but I still can't fit everything I need into one spot.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
You mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_arm#Gorilla_arm
The only things an iPad (or iPhone/iPod touch) has more in common with PADD's are ... touch sensitive screens
The ONLY thing?
That turns out to be EVERYTHING.
As for the article, one of the reasons a lot of people like the iPad is that it's Stark Trek UI brought to life. I can't help be repeat the quote from Penny Arcade here:
I have been waiting for the ability to manipulate technology by pressing dynamic symbols for basically ever. If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses. Get with the fucking program. Come and touch the neon glyphs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When I can casually toss it onto my desk like Picard without worrying about the thing shattering, it will have officially replaced books.
Well here you go.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...Data: "Aye aye, captain." [fingers blur on PADD, then stop. Data just sits there.]
Picard: "Mr. Data?"
Data: "Yes, captain?"
Picard: "Are you ready?!"
Data: "Custom software deployed sir. Enemy ship collapsing"
How is this possible?
Because of course they are members of the iPhone Enterprise development program and can thus enjoy in-ship distribution... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
using your PADD. There needs to be an app for that!
It was the kind of interface described in "Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson. (Written, or more accurately typed, on an old Underwood manual.)
You don't need the latest and greatest wizz-bang tech to have one hell of an imagination. :-)
I have a podcast about Paul Otlet and his vision for a kind of Google years before there was even an internet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
All the other bridges are dead-quiet, even the "earlier" NX-01 Enterprise.
They were all IM'ing each other.
Kirk wouldn't let the crew instal Jabber because he preferred to hear himself talk.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To me, the thing that was dumb about TNG-era ST & PADDs was how they were passed around to transfer data. Riker would say "here's my report" and pass Picard his PADD. Picard would then put it aside to read it later. I could see Picard calling up Riker's report on Picard's PADD but to pass it around that way? Lame.
Why haven't I seen a PADD app for iPhone/iPad yet?
I remember that episode where Data had to Jailbreak the PADD so Riker could access the homeworld computer system of Adobe-10
Now I know why the Enterprise had 1000 crew members. 750 walk around and clean touch pads.
:q! Oh crap, not again...
Now, on topic, I actually can't help but wonder how much (not if) they copied from ST
As was pointed out, the very name was from Star Trek... actually I'm amazed that connection was not made more commercially, but perhaps that would have meant a large battle with the Star Trek lawyers.
The actual elements though, I think that it follows someone seriously thinking about use of the thing and logical layouts as set designers did years ago, would hit on similar conventions to someone building the device in practice.
But, many of those that have "all that sneer" are still going to be creating the actual tech that everyone else uses.
It seems that way now but long term I'm not sure how true that will be.
I mean, I'm not doing assembly anymore...
However the death of textual interfaces has long been predicted and I still use a bash shell heavily every day, so I'm not willing to commit 100% to that as THE future.
The thing of it is, that those sneering aren't the ones who are going to be creating for the new tech because they have no respect for it. Most developers have embraced touch screen interfaces a this point, I would not claim they are "sneering" any longer. They just see it as one aspect of computing but (as you do) the other aspects will remain. I think they will remain but it is question of degree to which that is true. The future may be more like the past, where once only geeks really had "computers" (like Sun workstations and CAD stations and the like) and the rest of the world has computing devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
News flash: Many of the engineers who design things like the iPad, "flip" cell phones, etc., are Star Trek fans, and probably designed those things in either conscious or unconscious imitation of fictional technologies they'd seen on the show. Film at 11:00. Seriously, Star Trek in its various incarnations has been a pretty big influence on pop culture. Characters like Mr. Spock (cold, rational) and Captain Kirk (swaggering, arrogant, yet having plenty of competence to back up the braggadocio) have become archetypes. "Beam me up, Scotty", "Engage!", "Make it so", and so on have become catchphrases in mainstream culture. The first space shuttle was named Enterprise because thousands of Star Trek fans wrote letters to NASA, their Congressperson, etc. I bet when our culture finally does design a starship, it'll end up looking as much like the Enterprise as engineering considerations will allow: saucer-shaped hull + a cigar-shaped hull + 2 engine nacelles out on pylons.
However the death of textual interfaces has long been predicted and I still use a bash shell heavily every day, so I'm not willing to commit 100% to that as THE future.
Talk of "the death of textual interfaces" seems short-sighted to me. It is true that for many, many things, a more GUI-oriented approach is simply better. The days of a textual interface as the primary means of interaction are certainly long gone. However, I believe the value of textual interfaces in the appropriate context is underrated. Finding and running commands (whether at a command line or in an application) is a really valuable feature to have handy in an environment that offers a lot of functionality. GUI structures like menus and cascading menus or button bars are inherently problematic when it comes to presenting a huge feature set. For the sake of clarity, a GUI has to be limited to the set of commands that are most commonly used, so that subset of functionality can be made intuitive and properly streamlined. But how does one access functionality beyond the convenient subset? Activate "off-by-default" toolbars, searching through the various toolbars looking for the particular tool in question? Pop open the help system, search for the command, and read the instructions on how to access it, and then access it?
I think a better approach is to streamline those "help system" steps - make the assumption that finding obscure commands is a reasonably common operation, integrate it into the mainstream UI. Work it so the command can be launched immediately from the context where it's found... and if there's a shortcut for that command, non-obtrusively inform the user as soon as they're done with this long-form invocation.
Where does this get us? The Meta-X interface to "Emacs", basically. You can enter a partial command, tab-complete, invoke the command, and the command window will show you the shortcut if there was one. (Searching for commands could probably be handled better in Emacs, though...) I'm not claiming Emacs is perfect but this is one thing I love about it, and would really like to see incorporated into more "rich functionality" GUI programs. This is one way textual interfaces can continue to serve us well even as we discard more of the ancient relics of command-line computing. Textual interfaces tend to be rather unfriendly at present largely because the current ones are mostly old. Most current UI design focuses on GUI concepts, and the whole idea of a keyboard command interface is all but ignored. I think there's good potential there that's been left largely untapped.
Bow-ties are cool.
The future Apple project was imagined in 1664 : it's called iNeken
So... I think previous art should be mentioned here.
Do this means bye bye to any and every patent that Apple holds over the iPad(d)?
http://xkcd.com/505/
Thats where Steve J got it right and Steve B got it wrong.
To make the iPhone in the first place, Steve J had to improve the small screen user interface.
Googles Padd, due to be released in 2012 !
(or so the Guardian of Forever tells me - off the record)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...because it brought so many new things in TV sci-fi! DS9 may seem less distant, but it really lacks the smell of new and exciting things that TNG brought to TV audiences!
Oh boy! I have mod points again! ...oops!
Make America grate again!
This is a pity, because that's probably the only reason I'd buy one.
Here, take a look... http://www.lcarsdeveloper.com/
The iPad is fine but what I want to know is where can I get a holodeck?
It explains the popularity of tabloids (NY Post and DailY News sized) over broadsheets (NY Times and Wall Street Journal,)
The device HAS to fit fit naturally within our limitations.
Would YOU walk around with a 17.5"x22" tablet weighing 12 pounds?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I smell a lawsuit.
Creativity begets technology.