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."

Comments

Re:Wow...

[EricTheRed]

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.

I agree with you.

Think of all those e-readers out there, they too look like the smaller PADD's you see in TNG - albeit with black & white screens.

The only things an iPad (or iPhone/iPod touch) has more in common with PADD's are colour and touch sensitive screens, although some e-readers also have the latter.

I think there's too many iPad centric articles around at the moment, much to Apple's delight I think

not quite.

[Triv]

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.

Rubric for e-reader ubiquity

[trickofperspective]

When I can casually toss it onto my desk like Picard without worrying about the thing shattering, it will have officially replaced books.

Very simple

[sjames]

The iPad is EXACTLY what the PADD would have been had the Ferengi designed it instead of someone in the Federation.

Re:PADD: CS

[cowscows]

I think the really interesting thing here is that some big and well funded companies have been trying to sell tablet computers for over a decade, yet never made the same decision concerning the form factor that was obvious to a art director for a TV show twenty years ago. Basically that a computing device accessed via a touchscreen should have an interface specifically designed to be operated via a touchscreen. That is the big difference between the iPad and the tablets that came before it. And also one of the big differences between the PADD and most of the tablets we've seen in the real world.

And I'd argue that it's not necessarily the job of computer scientists to make computing more friendly. They should be working on making software more efficient and powerful. Interface designers should be the ones worrying about making it more friendly. There is of course overlap and cross-communication between the two disciplines, but interface design is important enough that people should dedicate their work specifically to it.