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Viewer Friendly Interface
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alt title(s): Movie OS
Because real biometrics don't just say "CONFIRMED."
"Shut up, everyone! My Internet browser heard the word "Fry" and opened up a video of Phillip J. Fry. It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some French Fries."
Casey: "I'm installing 'Cinema-OS', the operating system used in the movies."
Andy: "Any Downsides?"
Casey: "Yeah, it can't show any font under 72 point."
Any computer interface that is designed to be seen on television, as opposed to actually be useful for the user.
Key tenets:
- All fonts must be huge, and the resolution must be ridiculously low.
- All applications must be run full screen - there is no multitasking on television. Windows may show in the background, but they might as well be wallpaper for all anyone uses them.
- All makers of police database software must put extra effort in making the user interface have pizazz. The UI must have distracting and superfluous widgets, animations, and nonsensical bits of technical-sounding text and random numbers.
- The application interfaces must not conform to any established UI development standards. They must not share common interface conventions even between themselves (for instance, the facial recognition database cannot in any way function like or resemble the ballistics matching database).
- Superfluous animation and sound is required. When sending an e-mail, for example, it is useful to have an animation of the message folding itself into an envelope and flying off into the ether, accompanied by a synthesized woman's voice informing the user that the email is being sent. When searching through any database (such as a fingerprint database), it is useful to flash an image of each search failure just to let you know the program is working. (In real life, this would increase the search time by a factor of 10).
- Passwords are never obscured by asterisks as they are typed. Passwords are always simple, non-case-sensitive English words, and never a random combination of numbers and letters.
- Text being displayed, such as incoming email, must appear on the screen one letter at a time, as if it is typed in right then. Sound effects are optional.
- All computers running in a scientific institution display a spinning DNA helix, positioned in a top corner, at all times. Atoms with electrons on fixed paths are a popular alternative.
- If the interface talks, you can expect it to audibly announce every single function and command, no matter how impertinent or routine.
- Any kind of graphics manipulation software will be positively controlled with keyboard only, and the amount of clicking noises is the sole factor determining the effectiveness of operation. All manipulation is done on rectangles, which are selected automatically and then zoom in to fill the screen, line by line. Arbitrary zooms and other image enhancements work instantly and on any input; a single pixel of source from a surveillance camera is just about enough to extract a hidden message written with a substance only visible in ultraviolet light.
- Computer equipment is highly sensitive to concerned looks, grunting "hmmm"s, and crossed arms. Two or three people possessing the above, standing behind the person operating the computer, will immediately unlock just the right functions needed in the software.
- That must be how graphic editing programs can render five pixels into a recognizable image if someone stands there saying "Enhance."
- Every operation for the computer brings up a titled progress bar. This bar will be enormous, color-coded, will obscure the entire screen, and will always say something like "Hacking Into Pentagon: 45% Complete."
- Computers can tell what type of file you have not just down to the file extension, but what it does, providing such prompts as "Downloading Virus" or "Uploading Medicine."
- Touch-screens may be prominently involved, though it has been proven that constantly raising your hand to touch a screen over a long period of time is unnatural and uncomfortable, to the extent that those in the field have dubbed it "gorilla arm."
Often, a Viewer Friendly Interface is a front end for a Magical Database. Also, a Viewer Friendly Interface is often made of Beeping Computers.
For Science Fiction, however, We Will Use Micros In The Future. Contrast with Unusual User Interface.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, Kaiba goes to his Hacker Cave and uses a computer that follows almost all of the above rules to break into Pegasus’ secret database (It does multitask, but then again the screen is 2 by 3 metres). Seeing as it’s also commenting on his mood, it might be more advanced than it looks like.
- Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series: "My extremely advanced computer systems make Pegasus's security seem like a really boring video game!"
- The Magi from Neon Genesis Evangelion use a particularly flashy multi-layered holographic interface, and see fit to blank out every display in Central Dogma if something bad happens. Which it inevitably does. With great frequency.
- To be fair, they are supposed to be highly advanced A Is; they probably feel that they have to show a flashy interface in order for the humans to pay any attention to them.
- It's also somewhat averted whenever Ritsuko needs to modify them; she has to engage in a lot of rapid-fire typing to create a lot of what is probably total gibberish, but looks surprisingly like some C-like programming language. Once she's done though, this trope snaps back in full force.
- Averted in Death Note; when Light accesses his fathers computer, he uses an interface that looks a lot like MS Windows
- Another notable aversion is the Haruhi Suzumiya anime, which doesn't use anything more complex than Windows XP.
Comic Books
- One of the reasons you so rarely see computers used in comic books is that it's virtually impossible to make the display look even half way decent. All Star Superman showed a monitor head-on once, displaying a word processor with letters that took up half the screen.
Film
- In Jurassic Park, Lex sees a graphical, 3D representation of a file system, which she immediately identifies as UNIX. Surprisingly, this actually is a real UNIX program, a Silicon Graphics file browser designed mostly to show off. But it seems unlikely that even the most dedicated young hacker (of that time) would have seen it, and it certainly is not visually particularly UNIX-like.
- The book does away with this by presenting a basic command prompt. But, apparently, Michael Crichton enjoyed the movie interface, as the book for The Lost World uses a highly sophisticated mosaic display. Of course, this interface is a deliberate wink and nod at the uselessness of the movie's 3D display, since the resident whiz kid is unable to use it, it is horribly cumbersome, and it's actually just a severe distraction as the characters are trying to barricade themselves from the dinosaur attack.
- Bridget Jones's Diary, featuring messages displayed one letter at a time. This is actually real, if outdated. You can still find programs that allow for realtime chat that show exactly what is typed, when it's typed, but your average person wouldn't use one.
- In Alien Vs. Predator - when this sort of thing would usually require a modicum of human intervention - a computer announces by way of bright red flashing that it's detected an "unusual heat signature" and then zooms in on the satellite photos of the source and generates a map which shortly thereafter becomes a plot point.
- Admittedly, this is a computer getting a feed produced by the film's fictional Weyland Corporation, the founder of which is the "pioneer of modern robotics", but this takes place and was filmed in 2004, so this would have to be a case of Instant AI Just Add Water in that case.
- Computer usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written a list of the Top 10 Usability Bloopers in the Movies
- He should see Star Trek IV. It illustrates his point about the time travellers brilliantly- "Hello, computer."
- Iron Man embraced this trope with enthusiasm, though to be fair, this is Tony Stark's home and company..when an 'outside' computer was used, it used a mostly text-based interface, and unwieldy keyboard commands. (F5 then "i"?)
- Must have been running EMACS! C-x C-c
- As egregious as his home computer is, the computer program he used in the desert cave was remarkably realistic to this programmer troper. It featured C-style warning messages, as if he quickly threw code together without regards to "the Newest Standards."
- It could have been vi as well. :wq
- This troper is ashamed to admit he has written code with such elegant interfaces as T then shift+M then . then shift+. The progress bar, however, is entirely Rule Of Cool.
- Hackers, in which the Gibson supercomputer represents the various virus and hacking activities with super-flashy 3-D graphics. It has been noted that many of the basic viruses and techniques demonstated are based on real information, horribly extrapolated; it has been theorized that the visual displays were a cross between making these highly technical activities interesting to the average person, and a kind of Lampshade Hanging.
- Independence Day features an F/A-18 fighter display that is not only much more advanced than most F/A-18 HUDs, but also is kind enough to tell you why a missile didn't fire in detail.
- Generally averted in the Matrix trilogy. A particular example is in Reloaded, with Trinity working with a bog-standard Unix command-line interface to launch what is a plausible-looking attack. (The famous green-scrolling effect may well be an attempt to develop the most viewer (or at least user) unfriendly interface. There is comparatively little "real-life" UI shown - a holographic display on board the ships - but most of what's left is handled by jacking in.)
- The tools used (nmap) and ssh bug exploited (CRC 32 buffer overflow) were mostly real with only a small amount of Hollywood expediency thrown in.
- Computers in Sky Blue follow this trope; however, since the text is in English but the original dialogue is in Korean, it's questionable how viewer-friendly it was for the Target Audience.
Live Action TV
Real Life
- A Real Life example is the Compiz window manager for Linux, which allows for such graphical pizazz like windows that stretch and smear when moved, desktops organized in a cube, windows that appear from an unfolding paper airplane and disappear in searing fire, fireballs surrounding the cursor, and a Windows Vista-style shifting window switcher. Comes bundled with Ubuntu just to show off Linux and get others to install it.
- In the early days of Vista, this troper managed to get people to buy Vista-equipped computers based entirely off a demonstration of the Windows Flip 3D feature.
- That's what it's there for. The fact that it is actually useful once you've trained yourself to use it is beside the point. And they're doing it again in Windows 7 with a new feature - Snap.
- Just about everyone who has something to say about Mac OS X has something to say about the Dock. And some would say that it falls into this trope.
Video Games
- The game Uplink is a simulation of Hollywood Hacking. It has a UI set at a resolution low enough that you can, provides highly visible progress bars for everything, scrolls a list of attempted passwords (complete with individual letters locking into place) when hacking, and has an animation of dialing IP addresses.
- And that's not all! You also get ridiculously simple LAN configuration displays, access screens that have apparently been standardized all over the world, and just for shits and giggles, Elliptic Curve Cyphers that make no sense in real life and provide no reasonable means of unlocking them without hacking. As in, even the people who should have access would arguably have to hack it anyway.
Webcomics
- Casey & Andy has a strip about Casey installing "CinemaOS" on his computer, the features of which he lists as the ability to "instantly access any devices, all programs work perfectly, and you can hack into incredibly secure networks". When asked if it has any downsides, he says "It can't show any font under 72 point."
- The geek-oriented User Friendly strip has an entire Story Arc focused around Miranda producing Movie OS that functions exactly like those described above, and then fails to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Among other things, it was designed to have its entire security features disabled by typing "OVERRIDE".
Web Original
- Even independent films aren't exempt from this! The You Tube film Bradley's Summer, created as a project by middle school students, uses an enormous font in an AOL Instant Messenger conversation so it is readable to the viewers.
Western Animation
- Batman The Brave And The Bold: Batman and Red Tornado's computer display the commands in huge red capital letters that fill the entire screen and are occasionally accompanied by computer voice repeating what we can clearly read.
- In Futurama's Beast with a Billion Backs, Fry deletes Yivo's phone number from his mobile phone. He scrolls down a list of numbers that contains no more contacts than can be shown on the screen at once to Yivo's number, then presses the 'DEL' key. Show this troper a phone with a specially designed delete button, and this troper will eat his hat.
- Check out the Blackberry Pearl 8110. Enjoy the hat.
- Does a "Backspace" key count? My Palm Centro has one such key...
- Not to mention it's set in the year 3000-something. I'm sure cell phones may have different designs by then.
- The Sony Ericsson basic layout has a "C" button, which is a dedicated delete/backspace button. It's on the vast majority of their phones.
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