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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
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.
When I can casually toss it onto my desk like Picard without worrying about the thing shattering, it will have officially replaced books.
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
The iPad is EXACTLY what the PADD would have been had the Ferengi designed it instead of someone in the Federation.
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."
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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.
Note the early appearance of an iPad concept in Demolition Man
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.
Good catch. It's from the episode Babel.
http://www.chakoteya.net/DS9/405.htm
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Trek also predicted g0atse when Spock looked into that secret glowing box and went nuts.
Table-ized A.I.
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
...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