Are You Impressed by Futuristic Screens in Movies?

Basically, it revolves around the effort put into animating/creating holographic touch screens, bordered with glowing letters, and shifting interfaces feel more futuristic or create an effect to impress the audience. Whether they are computers, work stations, security consoles or even televisions, the hovering see-through screen seems to appear quite a lot.

In the movies you have watched, have you found the use of this Trope in question to impress you or evoke any emotion from you? Does it seem easy to ignore or fail to stun or amaze you?

Given that Star Trek's futuristic transponders ended up inspiring the design of the modern cellphone, as well as the touch-interfaces of most smartphones, I'd say it definitely had an impact on the public's imagination at the time. If anything, one of the reasons why it's become cliche and so many folks tend to nitpick the basic ergonomics of those futuristic computers today is because the public has seen a variant of the tech and now knows better.

Ex. a how annoying would it be to watch an action movie with a full 360 degree view, and miss the action because your eyes were somewhere else? What would the viewer focus on? Would it have a 360 degree background as well?

Like all tropes, Holographic Terminal and the like can be used both well and not so well. It's true that in many movies they are made so ridiculously graphical that the whole thing just falls flat. The main thing to make it work, I think, is that the system has to look like it's not just flashing lights but actually practical.

The one the PreCrime agents use in Minority Report is a good example. The way they control the files and pictures in different ways with different gestures really makes it look like a believable extension of our current technology. Also the way they can "throw" files from screen to another seems very practical.

On the other hand, Our Graphics Will Suck in the Future has its own shine to it. I found it very pleasing how the makers of Alien: Isolation copied the computer terminals straight from the movies, making them look pretty ancient in a setting that's otherwise fairly high tech. It was a nice touch.

edited 30th Nov '14 6:04:38 AM by Paradisesnake

Touch controls are horrendously fussy, buggy, and unreliable, and I'm immediately biased against anything that uses them extensively. Human movement is pretty imprecise without a tool of some sort, and machine interpretation of that just kind of double-dips the fuckup potential.

For instance, the whole "throwing screens" on Minority Report...well, you're not seeing the other 70% of the time it throws them to the wrong screen, fails to recognize the gesture entirely, or accidentally throws something they were really just trying to move to a corner, and the user has to move it to the right place themselves in more time than it would have taken them to just drag it with a more classic UI. And that's one of the few features of TOTALLY FUTURE interfaces I can actually see a compelling use for at all.

edited 1st Dec '14 8:55:49 AM by Pykrete

Whether holographic or projected on a standalone sheet of glass, transparent screens can bite me. Transparency means the screen is constantly wrestling with whatever's behind it for clarity.

Tony Stark can effortlessly make sense of and utilize his incredibly Awesome, but Impractical holo computer because RDJ just pantomimes shit and visual effects edits holograms around him. Actually trying to use a system like this would be an effort in futility.

edited 1st Dec '14 9:03:09 AM by TobiasDrake

I think an important factor why movies are using holo-screens is so that the movie watchers can see what the actor is doing with the computer and the actor's face at the same time. It may not be very practical in real life, but it's practical as a movie prop/technique.

edited 1st Dec '14 5:06:53 PM by nightwyrm_zero

I liked the whiteboard/screen in Mockingjay.

That wasn't too futuristic tho. It's basically a smart board, which every classroom has. Personally sometimes I don't think they're imaginative enough. We've seen holo-screens and such. Show us something we haven't seen!

edited 1st Dec '14 11:32:33 PM by Xopher001

An interface that would actually be practical?

Touch screens and the sort aren't inherently flawed, it's just that they're not really that refined enough. Given enough time, I don't doubt we'll be seeing Minority Report-esque interfaces that are outright reliable. We're already seeing people working on haptic feedback, which would improve usability of touch screens immensely.

This is an oddly specific thread.

I don't think that they are ''meant' to be impressive rather it's just a visual queue to the audience that this is tomorrow. Same as a miniskirts and videophones were forty years ago. And for the most part I think it's a plausible one

I think the common criticisms of Touchscreens and holographic interfaces being inefficient misses the point. People like visual interfaces. The computer mouse is a terrible example of economics and user interface when compared to proper use of keyboard shortcuts. But people still prefer reaching out a a touching stuff.

A mouse is a good happy medium of visual intuitiveness and precision. Pointing at stuff and dragging it around are actions we naturally connect to and it makes a nice middleman between brain and code, because not everyone is going to have the need or background to learn more efficient shortcuts. But ultimately, fingers are designed to manipulate tools, not be tools. They have greater precision of motion than their own contact area. Trying to make precision movements on a touchscreen is like trying to draw detailed architectural schematics with a thick crayon.

edited 7th Dec '14 9:39:42 AM by Pykrete

But what do we give children when they wanted to first draw pictures? Crayons.

The evolution of user Interface is based not on detail and precision but accessibility.

Unless you actually want to do something useful. There's a certain minimum bar of precision and flexibility to doing much more than fridge doodles. In a business app for instance, the amount of data that has to be presented in an intuitive and navigable format is already staggering.

With the best tools out there, you use a highly customizable interface that maximizes use of the entire screen. The display is typically optimized around screens at least 1024px in width, and it will use as much of it as possible to spread out all of your tables, reports, and charts. If it didn't, you have very long scrollbars, which are generally discouraged because users like to start with broad dashboards and then specify what to expand — or worse, horizontal scrollbars, which are generally a huge usability no-no. The bulk of your operations are done via icons and links that are about 20-30 pixels in size, which is about the minimum amount you can have visually distinguishable elements with clearly legible text and comfortable padding so your eyes don't strain. This is why packages like Bootstrap have the default button stylings they do — it's based on tons of usability research.

For even the largest mobile devices, you have to support down to 768px. This already involves a whole lot of UI concessions and minimizations just to fit the thinned-down thing on the screen. But that's not enough.

See, the contact area of your fingertip is about 40px if you have small hands, and most usability guidelines tell you to prepare as high as 60px for some grown men. This means you have to double or triple the size of those elements on an already very tiny screen. If you want a touchscreen that renders those elements big enough for meaty fingers to use reliably without disrupting UI flow even more to enlarge the elements, you'd need an Ipad the size of a widescreen TV. I won't stop you from carrying that around, but it might defeat the point of a mobile device.

edited 7th Dec '14 6:21:37 PM by Pykrete

Define 'useful'. If a systerm is user-friendly enough that I can say do my taxes throught a fridge doodles you'll be can be sure im gonna do it. People go for the quick and dirty way over the efficient way every time. We all would rather cut-twice if it means only measuring once.

You clearly understand system design but it's futile to try to teach people the 'right way' to do something… they go with what 'seems right' to them logic and efficiency be damned. Sometimes worse is better

Does that mean 'normal' desktop interfaces will become extinct? No they won't disappear entirely. Even in minority report keyboards and mice still noticeably existed. But they were in the background and away from the action. To be avoided when ever possible where simplified intuitive input could be used instead.

edited 7th Dec '14 6:42:13 PM by joeyjojo

Doing your taxes? This is a 1040-EZ,◊ which is about the lightest kind you'll get. Most of the fields reference each other somehow, so you want to minimize vertical scrolling, and the column layout means you want to prevent horizontal scrolling entirely. You then have to enlarge it enough so the fields are large enough to focus without hitting the wrong one, and then most of the display gets hidden by the virtual keyboard anyway, which effectively blinds you to all the field interdependency.

Applications like Turbotax et al condense it to what's essentially a Surveymonkey and then autofill the thing for you at the end. But then it also runs on a depth-first tree. This is doable for standardized sequential operations like taxes with a strictly defined list of tasks and sub-tasks. But most business applications are centered around overviews and flexible prioritization of tasks, and the customer can usually customize their own workflow from scratch (the flowcharts for these alone can span several pages). For that you absolutely need to present a breadth-first dashboard, and the kind of data they populate it with is usually the sort that wouldn't fit on a mobile device at all even if it was the only thing on the screen. Even the internal forms will contain a high enough degree of interdependency that you really need to show the whole thing at once if you don't want to backtrack so often that you risk getting lost.

As far as teaching the customer the "right way" to do something, you both can't and to an extent have to. The company I work for has entire teams of usability engineers who have to go through hundreds of conflicting customer wishlists before putting together our design changes, and we have entire IT departments just to answer questions and teach superusers how to get things set up for their company. That's just how things work when you have to deal with that much data.

The kind of scale I'm talking about is why I can see the face-value appeal of a Minority Report style of interface. In theory, it's great for interacting with entire subviews. But even if you could get the throwing gestures to work reliably (probably not — even with perfect parsing, the precision it would need to detect the gesture in the intended direction and without false positives is tighter than the human arm is likely to deliver, and that's not even getting into what happens if you need to listen for drag operations inside the subview), frankly, touch screens just suck at performing precise operations like the kind you need to interact with individual elements once you've selected a subview to work with. It's why we use pencils instead of fingerpaints.

edited 7th Dec '14 7:55:41 PM by Pykrete