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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

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Examples

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 fish, 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.
  • Based on the computer representations in Akamatsu's earlier AI Love You.
  • this geeky Linux-using troper notes that the fishes do not represents viruses in overall, but TCP packets. It's the jellyfishes that are the viruses.
  • I think of Corrector Yui when I saw that first, actually.
• 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.
  • This troper's favorite 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.
  • The Transformers movie. This troper watched it with a bunch of his friends, but even drunk, this group of CS students were rather unamused by what they tried to pass for actually meaningful data. Just about the only believable thing were the sound analysis programs.
    • Except that they're using sound analysis programs to try to figure out how somebody hacked their computers. Believable programs maybe, but the entire premise was unbelievable from the start.
  • 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

• 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.
  • The fact it's all in a fictional language instead of English doesn't help matters.
• 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).
• 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 2050s 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 OfficeSpace), raising the question of what exactly the designers thought they were supposed to be there for.
    • To be fair to the designers, it's generally difficult to get a computer to know how long it will take to do something before it's done it. Getting a good estimate, in some cases, actually takes longer than just doing the damn thing it's trying to predict how long it will take to do.
    • Instead of difficult, try impossible. It's called the Halting Problem.
    • No Just No. The Halting Problem does not work that way. It only applies to Turing-complete systems capable of entering an infinite loop. For a linear system, the only excuse for such a horrible progress bar is that the original coders were too lazy to analyze their code and calibrate the callbacks properly.
  • 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.
• In the early days of desktop workstations, this troper's father was an engineer faced with solving a very large number of complex, tedious calculations. The obvious solution was a computer program - however, given the processing power of the era, it took about 6 hours to run, during which time the workstation simply sat there and crunched numbers with no display. Since these were shared workstations, someone would invariably come along, decide the workstation was simply hung, and restart. Warning signs, flipping over and even disconnecting the keyboard were to no avail. The eventual solution was to add a command that caused "Chugga" to appear each time the program cycled, adding two hours to the total run time, but making it very clear that yes, the gee-whiz gadget was doing something useful.
• 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.
  • Third-party applications save the day!
• This troper programs in TI-BASIC (on Texas Instruments graphing calculators). One line of code printing to the screen usually takes about as long as executing eight lines of anything else. However, when you're debugging the program it helps to know what it's doing, so if it randomly hangs/loops/breaks/craps out you can tell where it happened. Or if it's supposed to be performing several operations you can see where it is, and if it gives an incorrect result you can tell where it fudged. But in the finished versions of the programs, displaying progress for a short-cycle program (i.e. one with less than about ten operations being repeated until completion) will make it take about 1.5x as long.
• 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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