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Extreme Graphical Representation
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The opposite of We Will Use Micros In The Future is Extreme Graphical Representation, where every operation that takes place in the computer is represented by flashy, often "futuristic" animations on the screen. These fantastic light shows have no connection to whatever might be taking place, and real computer professionals invariably find them impractical and implausible.
This is due to biology: To humans, movement means activity. Lack of movement means it's inactive - dead. So if it doesn't look like the piece of gee-whiz technology is doing something, we don't believe it is doing anything. Thus, an Extreme Graphical Representation will almost always involve some kind of visible activity — whether it's obvious or subtle. And since it's just a prop, the activity usually isn't related to anything at all.
This is Truth In Television as every home computer has blinking lights on it, mostly around the 'on' switch. And verbose modes and system monitors are bound to be used more than it's really necessary. That way if neither disk light blinks nor progress bar moves, the user can allay the growing suspicion that the program quietly hung five minutes ago and he's just sitting there, waiting for nothing. Also, routers and such have tons of blinking lights on them. Legends say that the manuals tell you what the blinking lights on the router means. However, these myths are unconfirmed, as nobody reads those things.
See also: Viewer Friendly Interface, The Aesthetics Of Technology, Beeping Computers, Billions Of Buttons
Examples
General
- Almost any depiction of email use in movies, television, or other graphical media is unlike any real-world example, with lots of added graphics and bells and whistles, and often doing things that email simply can't do. Examples that come to mind include Copycat and The Peacemaker.
- Many basic computer functions and software face similar unrealistic depictions. Particularly ridiculous when trying to depict "hacking into" a computer system.
Anime and Manga
- Serial Experiments Lain. In fact, you can find on Sourceforge.net the LainOS Project
 , a (apparently abandoned) project to create an operating system with as much pizzazz as the computers from Serial Experiments Lain.
- An extreme example of this is Chisame's artifact in Mahou Sensei Negima. She's a hacker to begin with, so her artifact lets her actually enter the computer system, Tron style, for super-hacking. Some of the extreme graphics include viruses that look like jellyfish, Magical Girl anti-virus programs (actually two of her classmates, dragged into the computer with her), and Clothing Damage to represent data being destroyed. Observe.
- This is based on the computer representations in Akamatsu's earlier AI Love You.
- Ed, of Cowboy Bebop fame utilizes some rather trippy fish decor on whatever terabyte, terahertz-chugging OS she uses. But she's just like that.
- While the original series had some flashy displays, Rebuild Of Evangelion has super orgasmovision 5d parallax screens for everything, even the monitors that more or less say: "Power Switch: On" or the ones that show where the Evas and Angels are in relation to each other.
Film
- Jurassic Park showed a 3D interface to all the park's systems. It's actually a real program — a proof-of-concept file-system manager included with every SGI. Not much use as an industrial control UI.
- In The Matrix, real world computers use the flashy scrolling green characters of the "Matrix code", but in the virtual world, to the glee of many - shall we say - security analysts, a real hacking program was used.
- Various spaceship displays in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Usually these alternated between animated vector graphics and readouts of math equations.
- Bonus points because the screens were actually projected onto Bowman's face when he was in the pod, so that the audience could see what the computer was doing, as if it were just reflected in the faceplate of his helmet when he was wearing one.
- In Minority Report, the gestural interface reacted instantaneously to a variety of hand motions; had several layers of transparency, and actually appears relatively easy to use. Also justified as the only work we saw it heavily used for was sorting through the precogs visions.
- Every computer screen seen in Enemy Of The State has blatantly unnecessary bits of video, animated images, and scrolling text visible.
- The Angelina Jolie vehicle Hackers was filled to the brim with this trope.
- The best part is when one of the hackers is browsing the corporate database by flying through whizzing algorithms and through a grid of giant reflective monoliths that represented different sectors of data. Then when he saves the junk file to his floppy disc, it is later viewed on a home computer in exactly the same browsing manner.
- Seeing how whenever a non- POV character used a computer, they used a plain- looking OS (it's a bit hard to catch on your first watch), it might even be Handwaved as some sort of hybrid between Rule Of Cool, The Rashomon and Rule Of Perception, as that's probably how the OS looked to the experienced hackers.
- Used quite noticeably in the 2007 Transformers film—apparently, if you take a sound file of a signal broadcast by a Transformer, open in in Audacity, and zoom in really close to the waveform, you can see Cybertronian glyphs.
- Funnily, an episode of Beast Wars plays this straight. Tigatron hacks Megatron's ship, by connecting himself to the computer. The interface turns into a Virtual reality not unlike that seen in Hackers (complete with Tigatron doing the movements in needs to do in the simulation with his real hands), with a rubix cube of Megatron's head as the password. Now, this raises questions as Transformers are robots to begin with, couldn't they come up with more efficient interfaces than virtual reality for their own ships?
- District 9 features alien vehicles controlled via a holographic panel, as demonstrated towards the end of the movie. But then, it's alien technology; you shouldn't expect them to be using any kind of real-world OS.
Live Action TV
- In the new V series, the Visitor holographic computers are like this.
- No computer on 24 operates without flashy, explanatory graphics.
- Computer screens on Andromeda are filled with scrolling text and rotating graphics, none of which appear to mean anything, and would seem to make it difficult or impossible to see what's really going on.
- Max Headroom, in which the System (i.e. what in Real Life would come to be the Internet) generally looked either like a crude wireframe mockup of the real world, or alternatively, like a series of tubes.
- Star Trek loves this trope.
- TOS had equipment covered with lights that blinked and cycled, but no apparent labels or other way for the crew to identify which light meant what.
- Given that the Enterprise is a military vessel, this sort of makes sense—if the ship is invaded/boarded, it would be far more difficult for a hostile intruder to take control of the ship if they don't have the specific, specialized training Starfleet officers receive.
- The newer shows have smooth black panels, backlit with meaningless blinking lights. They do have labels, but close shots reveal most of them are just random numbers and letters.
- Not necessarily "random" or "meaningless". Just because the graphics on the LCARS panels have no specific meaning to you, it doesn't mean they don't mean something to Starfleet officers trained to use them.
- Some of the panels contain in-jokes or even easter eggs (e.g. the Enterprise-D Master Systems Display in engineering)
- In NCIS in mulitple episodes, Agent Dinozzo's computer can be seen with multiple programs running constantly, yet he's the least tech savvy of the group.
- Exception: The Stargate SG-1 episode "Hathor" includes several web sites that look perfectly realistic, if a bit large on the font sizes. On the DVD, the url beginning with file:// is visible, however. The episode "Seth" also featured web sites which could have easily been taken from the real world wide web.
- However, Stargate's alien displays usually follow this trope to a T, with endless scrolling columns of alien text coupled to an Unusual User Interface.
- The best was probably the giant hologram projector that turned out to be a book.
- "Information: In the second episode of Blakes Seven, the computer Zen initially does not have any sort of display. When he realizes that "your species requires a visual reference point," he begins flashing lights on one wall in time to his speech."
- Parodied in this Something Awful article about "MoFOS" (Movie Fake Operating System).
- Generally any crime drama on TV will show computers with a ludicrous unnecessary graphic interface. CSI especially seems to love it.
- Ditto Torchwood to some extent, where the idea appears to be to take a screensaver and run it as the desktop wallpaper.
- Various supplimentary media (like the website) have stated that Torchwood's computer is some sort of alien being hooked into their system instead of having any kind of CPU. The spiralling tentacle-like screen saver running in the background is meant to represent the creature's new virtual body as it manipulates a VR environment. Still fits the trope though as there is no reason the characters would have to see what the creature sees.
- Profit has an overblown 3D/avatar system to navigate its corporate network, although it's unclear if this is the actual interface or just represents what the users are doing with it.
- Justified in an episode of NUMB3RS, where a computer scientist hid the fact that his artificial intelligence computer is a fraud by creating a very elaborate and impressive looking computer room and interface.
Video games
- Many modern videogames have all sorts of flashing, rotating icons, blinking window popups, scrolling transitions, and all that sort of graphical pizzazz. These are real, actual user interfaces, the effects are somewhat moderate, but are still flashy.
- A slightly more low-key (but still flashy) interface is found in the computer game Uplink. Of course, the game is a simulation of the Hollywood version of hacking, so something would be amiss if it had a realistic interface.
- It does take place in the year 2010, letting it off some of its crimes. It also notes—in a hidden computer you can hack into—that the really extreme graphical representation of Johnny Mnemonic, while being "hilariously inaccurate", would be fantastic for Uplink 2: TERMINAL (not in development).
- Happy new year! Now, where is my Uplink Computer interface, all I see is Windows 7...
- Mass Effect, both in-game and its user interfaces. Starting a new game uses the in-game fiction of sending your name and a photo over a secure tunnel connections has a flashy loading screen.
- The cutscenes in Syndicate and Syndicate Wars show you sitting before a futuristic holographic interface at your desk in an airship, so the menus depict this interface with much beeping and whooshing.
- The fake TV you get to watch at the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 4 is obscenely decorative. Markers with unreadable text pop up to accompany every little action.
- In-game example: Ripper`s vision of the 2040s has everyone have to go into a virtual reality world in order to access the internet, and access websites via huge floating icons.
Western Animation
- In Futurama, some of the characters use a virtual reality version of the internet. They decide to do a search, so they all shade their eyes, squint, and look around in the distance. This particular episode had many more examples.
Truth in television
- This predates most fictional computers. For a public demonstration, the seminal ENIAC (built circa 1945) had light bulbs wired up to internal circuits, so people could actually see it do arithmetic. Otherwise, it would have meant starting at featureless equipment for minutes, just to have it print out a column of numbers. Due to The Coconut Effect, subsequent fiction featured computers that used giant banks of light bulbs flashing on and off, for no particular reason. Hackers dubbed this "blinkenlights".
- The Connection Machines, a line of supercomputers from the eighties, had a significant portions of their cases covered in huge grids of tiny red activity lights, put there for diagnostic use but also for dramatic effect.
- The NSA actually owned one of the flashier ones, and used it to break codes? I mean, this just writes itself.
- It did in Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. The NSA owned a gigantic codebreaking supercomputer. It was a huge, visually appealing mass of glass and hardware. Somewhat justified,; it needed to be that big, so if it was going to take up the whole room why not make it pretty?
- A real CM was used as the backdrop of the "control room" in Jurassic Park.
- The menu screen of the Excel Saga Volume 4 DVD is a confusing cacophony of multicolored flashing lights, glowing circles, and Excel's screaming, spinning head. It actually requires practice to navigate (hint: the glowing green circle is your cursor).
- Modern computers are filled with things which don't actually indicate progress, but instead are just there to give users sometimes to watch while they wait for the machine:
- The "animated hourglass", "spinning beachball", "ticking watch", "running dog", and similar cursors on both Mac and Windows.
- Throbbers of all sorts.
- Those little videos that play in Microsoft Windows whenever you do a simple file operation. They will keep going even if the disk drive stalls.
- The "progress bar" at the bottom of internet browser windows. For most operations, it just advances at programmed time intervals. This is especially egregious since a progress bar is supposed to indicate progress.
- Most progress bars are pretty awful. Either they advance quickly and then freeze at 99% where they do all the work, or they seem to work fine but reset themselves at the end and go on to another operation (for example, MSI packages for Windows tend to work this way. Also it's ruthlessly parodied in Office Space), raising the question of what exactly the designers thought they were supposed to be there for.
- For the matter, the hard drive activity light. While useful back when computers really only did one thing at a time and unreliable, modern computers and their software tend to always be doing something - usually completely unrelated to what the user is doing.
- The Compiz window manager, available for most Linux distributions, allows the user to install plugins to alter the appearance and behavior of most everything on their desktop. Some of these plugins are very trippy.
- Parodied by Stephen Colbert, who described defragmenting your hard drive: "A program where your computer moves a bunch of rectangles around to make you feel better." Tragically, Vista's defragger has lost the colored rectangles.
- It's been said on a recent Frontline special that the computers in one of Bernie Madoff's accounting offices relied on this in order to make clients and SEC officials believe that stuff was going on, and that the computers were actually doing what they were supposed to be doing. All the while, a much smaller office just below that one did the *real* "accounting" work.
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