Transcription

You know how they say fiction becomes reality? Makes you think. What inspired our modern interfaces? Come with me on a journey back in time. We are about to witness one of the first fictional interfaces in Metropolis. That's got to be humanity's first Zoom call. But we're in 1927, and that's a video phone. Sounds crazy, I know. But the first video phones were being tested at that same exact time. Which is a good start. I wonder which one made the first impact? The fiction or the real life? It's funny because for the next 20 years, until computers become a real thing, we won't see much fictional UI. But soon after that, there are gonna be some sparks. There! You see that? Those are the first CRT displays. And right after that, interfaces start slowly appearing here and there. They look like very basic control panels. But there are some creative ideas too. Like in 1956, they come up with synaptic interfaces. Showing humans controlling a machine through their minds. Like the modern brain computer interfaces. I mean, imagine playing a game just with your mind. Speaking of games, we're gonna have the first video game ever in the 60s. Spacewar! It's on one of those old CRT displays. But the game was light years ahead of its time in both graphics and mechanics. At that time, pilots used to train on these same monitors. And aircraft operators could interact with the data by using a light gun. Do you like your space interfaces, by the way? Good. Because we're gonna have a bunch of them in the 60s. Mostly with basic controls. Like switches, keys, and buttons on desks or even walls. They're not just in films, but also in animation. Like the first Astro Boy animations. So far, it feels like everyone is just dropping wild ideas. Until Star Trek The Original Series comes out with something much more futuristic. Screens are filled with colorful data chunks. And hundreds of keys and blinking lights without any labels. You might not be able to make much sense out of their idea of a super advanced interface. But this right here. I feel like it's the starting zone. Oh, 2001, of course. This movie captures some really primitive images versus some really advanced tech. You can actually feel a huge bump in interface design here. The UI is much more detailed. Because it's supposed to assist humans and help them access data in a meaningful way. Like charts and information screens. There were a lot of displays and buttons too. But I mean, that wasn't even half as crowded as the first space shuttles. So they did a pretty clean job. I guess minimalism isn't that modern of a UI practice anyways. What makes this movie iconic is that a lot of the ideas are still pretty fresh today. The evolution of humans and artificial intelligence. Or the interfaces that look so modern you could still get inspired by them. But things will evolve. Interfaces in the 70s are not going to be just means of communicating with the machine. Now they're maturing into different forms of UI for inputting and monitoring data. Okay, I know what you're thinking. Where is Star Wars? Well, Episode 4 A New Hope just premiered. And it has some of the coolest minimal scope UI for navigation and targeting. With a bunch of indicators in different colors and icons. Plus, have you noticed that there are no keyboards in the movie? The designer of the new Star Wars movie says that in the original movies, if there had been a keyboard on set, everyone would have thought they were in a pool of typists. And that's true. In the first movie, the last place you're looking at is the ship's computer. Nobody goes like, um, actually, that's not how UI works. So what does this mean? That the UI is utterly useless? Not necessarily. This was a good inspiration. Alien continues to combine the same style with windowed layouts like in the 70s computers. Showing different chunks of data and bringing back the keyboards with actual labels. Even though they don't really make much sense, there's an interesting story behind this design. This keyboard is used to activate an emergency auto-destruct in a challenging way. To, you know, make sure you don't accidentally blow up the ship. You could say it's kind of an early form of user experience design, which is pretty cool. But we might have to redefine cool. Because 80s offers even more space interface and flight simulators. Let's not forget the first Elite game. The UI in this game was so revolutionary and unique for its time. I wouldn't consider this just the game's UI, but also the UI in the world where the game takes place. And the same UI inspired so many space interfaces later on. But this is first of its kind. You're piloting a ship, landing on planets, trading resources, and fighting enemy ships. You have to keep an eye on so many metrics and navigate in one glance. Pretty efficient, huh? This was not your only way to experience the space in the 1980s. You could also get on the Starship Enterprise and boldly take UI where no one had taken it before. This show features an entire computer system designed for every single function with gigantic touchscreen tables. But let's talk about this UI. Well, it's more than just a UI. It's an entire system called LCARS or a Codogram named after its designer. It was designed to be distinct, minimal, and much more advanced than the previous shows. It works on any screen like massive displays, personal panels, or small tablets. It shows data chunks in Windows with lots of different indicators and call to actions. This was such a great system that continued to inspire many other similar shows. In the meantime, others are focusing on something different. New ideas are being born. Digital realms. HUDs. Time traveling. Holograms. AIs and replicants. Cyberpunks. And the internet. These are a lot to take in. But because the concepts are so fresh and fascinating, there's not a lot of emphasis on the UI per se. But we are seeing a lot more UI now than before in different forms of content like in sci-fi anime or games or even books. We're not just seeing more UI. We're also seeing more unique UI. In Men in Black, the screens are oval shaped with holographic effects. A style that Men in Black is still using to this day. Stargate shows somewhat of a detailed UI with ancient looking visuals. Yeah, they were into that kind of stuff back then. Games like Fallout came up with a unique approach to UI by giving you your own portable Pip-Boy. Which is kind of like a phone. But this is just the 90s. There is way too much going on in the world of fictional UI than in the real world. Franchises are already coming up with their brand new interfaces. For the first time, we're getting high resolution views of the Star Wars scope and targeting UI. Star Trek Enterprise is on TVs and it's showing the adventures of humans in the 22nd century. And it's not using the previously designed UI anymore. The new UI is less advanced. Well, actually, it's probably not good enough for 100 years in the future. But it's still very sophisticated and realistic for a 2000s show. They have windows, action buttons, physical keys and even video call UI. I kind of thought about actually using it for a while. And I have one thing to say. What? But you've probably not heard of these systems much in the media because they focus more on functionality than visual aesthetics. Because come on. It's a spaceship that travels 100 times faster than light. If you like visual aesthetics though, you're gonna love the next decades. It all starts with the ultimate lonely hacker meets society media. Mr. Robot. I mean, The Matrix. Beside the iconic VFX and Neil being Keanu Reeves yet again, you'll see some crazy digital adventures on seemingly average computers and interfaces. Even though humans are visibly craving more displays and bigger displays. Surrounding themselves with data and Matrix rain effects. Other similar movies continued the same trend until movies like Minority Report introduced a new UI trend to the world. Glowing blue screens. This is going to start a chain reaction across all sci-fi. Sometimes it's just your average blue UI on a normal screen. And other times it's a transparent blue hologram that reacts to characters pinching, zooming, and dragging to do certain actions. Like in modern gesture-based interfaces. One thing I'm not buying here is how the UI is portrayed to be so cluttered. There are windows of all sizes everywhere and they're all filled with small interactive elements and charts. I'm not gonna act like having all the information you need in front of you isn't appealing. But we're kind of moving towards a future where we are distracted by so many things that sometimes we just want to focus on one task at hand. So as much as you like to use these UIs, they don't offer much for functionality. They're not supposed to. You'd probably even get a headache if you use them for far too long. The vision for the future of interfaces seems to be changing from keyboards to touchscreens to augmented and virtual reality. And finally to holographic interfaces and basic shapes like displays or more advanced forms like full-on 3D projections in recordings, calls, workbenches, and massive models. This vision is really not that far off. It's making most movies like Ready Player One seem like a classic. Yeah, the future has been now for a long time. The glowing UI trend is slowly taking over every movie and show to the point that even Star Trek or Star Wars could not resist it in the newer movies. After 2010, many third-party studios and designers are handling the interface design part of the new science fiction media which is probably why they kinda look similar. It's not all repetitive though. There are a few modest UI like in Her. Tell me that doesn't look like a futuristic Mac. But that's not all. Every user in the movie seems to have a UI customized for their character. As its designer envisions, we could have AIs and smart designers in the future that anyone can use to create completely custom, handcrafted experiences just for themselves. So you would never have to wait for another system update. You wouldn't be limited to rain meters, skins, or wallpaper engine anymore. Wouldn't you just love that? On the other hand, I think video games did way better these past two decades. We started with games like Deus Ex that not only presented a super advanced future but also had the right UI and technology to present it with. One thing I like about video games from that era is that they were not afraid to speculate. That was why we started so many iconic franchises. In time, these franchises adopted the latest in tech and improved it with their own twist. We have new Pip-Boys in the Fallout series that stick around your arm. Or the holographic Omnitool in Mass Effect that does way more than a simple Apple Watch. And the diegetic UI of Dead Space that integrates within the game's world and creates an even more immersive experience. The feedback from these games was so good that the games after that were all like, f*** it, the game's UI is the world's UI. A lot of games have been adopting this in the recent years. But whether it will work or not depends on how well you design the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality. Now the question is, what will happen to the future of UI? Both fictional and real. We can't deny the impact each of them has on the other. And now that everything is moving so fast in the real world, they're so intertwined that it feels like fictional UI is trying a little too hard to seem futuristic. I guess I'm just happy that nowadays each and every human has the power to build much more creative interfaces than what they predicted back in the day. Now anyone can make those futuristic web interfaces with a simple UI framework. Who knows? Maybe the future of our UI won't be all chamfered blue polygons. Maybe for us to evolve as humans, our devices along with their UIs have to become unified following one superior system. Maybe it's time that HUDs got a bit more advanced in real life so we could imagine crazier things about them in the future movies and games. Maybe all we need is a holographic AI friend who will fix our lives. Or maybe everything will be dumped down in a completely opposite direction. I don't know. What do you think? Well, that's all for this journey. If you liked it, make sure you do your magic down there and see you on the next one.