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Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: At Motherboard, Alex Pasternack writes: "Star Wars is set in a world of wildly advanced technology. But take a good look at the machinery of Star Wars, and you may be surprised to see how wonderfully analog it all is -- buttons! levers! vector graphics! Yes, there are hyperdrives and lightsabers and hologram Princess Leias and droids that know six million languages (including the language of moisture vaporators, along with various etiquette and diplomatic protocols useful across the galaxy). But it's also a world where sometimes you have to hit a robot to get it to work, like an old dashboard radio, a place where the supercomputers are operated manually and where buttons and control panels and screens seem far removed from our own galaxy: tactile, lo-fi, and elegantly simple." May the 4th be with you.
My graphics prof told us that the people hired to do the graphics for Star Wars were instructed to make it look more primitive. The technology already existed to do filled colored polygons and deal with pop-up and so forth. But when Lucas or whoever saw their first pass, they said it looked too good. So for example, in the trench run briefing, you see that they went to green wireframes with massive pop-up problems where big chunks just suddenly appear.
It's low-fi because Dune was lo-fi. As "The Secret History of Star Wars" reveals, the original treatment even included "spice", which became "the force". The SW universe has Tatooine ("totally not the desert planet Arrakis of the Dune series." Dune had a reason for their analog high tech: The Butlerian Jihad forbade machines which could think, and destroyed all instances of such tech. In the Star Wars universe we scratch our heads and wonder why the low-fi... Well, now you know, it was a wonderful aesthetic borrowed from Dune and is thus otherwise inexplicable.
Why is tactile interface using buttons and levers bad? - is it just because a touch screen is so fashionable currently? Touchscreens serve for some use cases - Emulating buttons in a screen instead of real buttons is like a human living his life (outside the screen) with only one finger . We have so many degrees of control and feedback available in our hands, legs and we should use them effectively to interact with devices. An example is that of a car. This hand-eye-leg combined interface is what creates the feeling of 'oneness' with the machine - like how many of us feel that the car has become our extension - we are in full control.
Touchscreen as the sole interface is a short term aberration and I think soon the industry start bringing back tactile (and not just limited to pressing buttons - but also to levers & knobs).
As an extreme example there is Obi-Wan's lightsaber: it was built from an 1940's airplane engine, a WWI rifle grenade, a 1970's calculator, a WWII machine gun, a 1930's camera flash and a 1970's faucet knob.
That's way to sophisticated ;)
In the 1960's German TV series "Raumpatrouille Orion" (Space Patrol Orion) they used things like faucets and electric irons as controls, easily identifiable as such in the films.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Some of Dr. McCoy's surgical instruments in Star Trek were salt and pepper shakers. I have a set.