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Fantasy UI

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Re: Fantasy UI

#111

Post by njharman »

chris_st wrote: post #80
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #46

The single biggest common denominator between so many fantasy UIs, is transparent (HUD-style) interfaces. I was just watching the latest episode of The Expanse , last night, and saw them all using these transparent PDA/phones. Ever try using a transparent UI? It's absolutely maddening. Looks cool on the screen, but is pretty much unusable IRL.

I remember in early(ish) Linux, the terminal programs had a setting to be at least partly transparent, so your desktop background (and other windows? I forget) could show through. Wound up constraining what desktops you could choose, and how you had to set up your terminal colors. And since I prefer dark text on a light background, it didn't work for me from the beginning. I imagine those programs still have those se…

I do this while programming. Very very low transparency. To see status/output. of windows behind.

Hmm, I guess I don't do this anymore. Since getting giant 4k TV/monitor. So, guess it had use in constrained screen realstate times

Re: Fantasy UI

#112

Post by flobosg »

lordleft wrote: post #99
flobosg wrote: post #14

The fantasy UI of Neon Genesis Evangelion[1,2] left a deep impression on me when I watched the original series for the first time. And, in my opinion, it has aged very well. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/PF3oA [2]: https://imgur.com/a/uDeBs

Absolutely loved the typography and UI of NGE.

This is a nice and comprehensive article about the typography of NGE: https://fontsinuse.com/uses/28760/neon-genesis-evangelion

Re: Fantasy UI

#113

Post by IgorPartola »

krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

I am not a designer. I understand them the way I understand original user interfaces that were not computer generated. Think of the giant chrome steering wheel of a large ship. Or the ornate decorations of some fancy locomotive. The idea is to mirror the craftsmanship that went into the function of the device in its controls. To help the operator feel more comfortable and familiar with the machine. To recall certain details of the device in its controls (unique square grill on a car might dictate square gauges). Utilitarian controls are better in some respects, less distracting. But they aren’t as fancy.

Now translate that to us trying to show a future design or a more advanced but ancient design than what we have today. You could go minimalistic and it’s just a bunch of blank buttons and the operator just knows what they do. What a piano might look like to someone who isn’t familiar with pianos. That can have a certain type of appeal, but if your intention is to show the device as both advanced AND important, then it’s a big challenge to make the UI stand out. You could also make the UI baroque with unnecessary embellishments to show that it is so fancy and advanced that it hasn’t reached the point of mass production where economic forces would have dictated that it be simplified. Why have a holographic display that just renders a swirly button when you can have a simple push button? Well, because we are going all out creating this singular object. It’s a way to emphasize the device.

I think The Martian had some very cool UIs because they managed to walk the middle road: they seemed like they were actually designed for function but were also clearly more advanced than what we use today. But by that metric they were also much closer to what we have today.

Another factor to all this is that UI is dictated by its medium. What kind of hardware can we use for UIs? Well so far we have physicals dials, buttons, toggles, and switches. We also have touch screens. In more of the real of sci fi we have motion capture and voice interfaces, both starting to slowly be adopted as the cost comes down. And in the pure speculative we have things like holographic interactions, nanobotic renderings, and a broad category of telepathy (that last one is really good for stories about the hero simply learning to believe in themselves because long training is for suckers). But how many types of materials and devices and materials have we not yet discovered? Ones that could be used to create a UI in a completely novel way. Maybe it’s a blood contrast that gets injected into your bloodstream and makes it easier to track your motion precisely. Maybe it’s magnets or RFID chips embedded in your fingers that allow you to interact with a theramin type device more intuitively. Maybe it’s direct to retina projection that an outside observer can’t even see. Maybe it’s a smart UI that is programmable ahead of time and it’s activation is simply timed. Maybe it’s something that reads its inputs by facial recognition and emotion detection. Maybe some material that once our hands are coated in it can make them feel whatever physical controls are supposed to be there without having to pay foe them to physically manufactured.

The point is that as long as fantasy UIs are going to be constrained to only a few mediums, the only way to set them apart is to make them either super fancy, super grungy, or super minimalistic/magical. Making them utilitarian and usable makes them look contemporary.

Re: Fantasy UI

#114

Post by LocalPCGuy »

afavour wrote: post #65
_trampeltier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most todays UI is not really great. On websites you often can't navigate just with the keyboard and shortcuts does not work at all. An a really terrible new UI thing are these on / off sliders. So often is not clear where the slider is, because it's not clear if the slider or the background is colored. Also a lot of new software comes with shortcuts, but you would need 3 hands to push all buttons for it. Also for…

Why is keyboard use the pinnacle of UI? Pretty much every device has some kind of mouse-like device attached to it, and trackpads with good scrolling (e.g. Apple ones) are a wonderfully intuitive way to control movement. I get that HN likes using the keyboard for stuff like terminals, I do too. But web pages aren’t terminal applications.

Because not everyone can use a mouse or similar UI interaction device, but not only is a keyboard generally usable, there are a ton of accessibility devices that can mimic a keyboard's signals. Not nearly as simple to emulate a mouse or similar pointing device.

That's why keyboard usability is important.

Re: Fantasy UI

#115

Post by LocalPCGuy »

pc86 wrote: post #49
_trampeltier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most todays UI is not really great. On websites you often can't navigate just with the keyboard and shortcuts does not work at all. An a really terrible new UI thing are these on / off sliders. So often is not clear where the slider is, because it's not clear if the slider or the background is colored. Also a lot of new software comes with shortcuts, but you would need 3 hands to push all buttons for it. Also for…

Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).

Not everyone can use a mouse or similar UI interaction device, but not only is a keyboard generally usable, there are a ton of accessibility devices that can mimic a keyboard's signals. Not nearly as simple to emulate a mouse or similar pointing device.

That's why keyboard usability is important.

Re: Fantasy UI

#116

Post by LocalPCGuy »

afavour wrote: post #63
protomyth wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused how a person can play a 3D video game with just a keyboard, but a website is beyond control? I don't think a car is a good comparison as it is in 3D space unlike a website.

Because there’s a very small defined set of actions a person can take in such games: backwards, forwards, left, right, etc. By comparison pages have dozens of links, form fields, menus, etc. It’s not that they can’t be navigated with the keyboard alone, it’s that it’s rarely the most efficient way of doing it. Clicking a link will always be quicker than pressing tab X number of times to select it.

Tab is not how most keyboard only users navigate web pages. There are an entire set of built-in keyboard navigation utilities for those that cannot use a pointing device.

Re: Fantasy UI

#117

Post by WalterGR »

What tools are used to create these UIs?

There are a ton of videos to watch. Does anyone know offhand what tools are used? Or if there are good select videos to watch?

Re: Fantasy UI

#118

Post by ummonk »

afavour wrote: post #63
protomyth wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused how a person can play a 3D video game with just a keyboard, but a website is beyond control? I don't think a car is a good comparison as it is in 3D space unlike a website.

Because there’s a very small defined set of actions a person can take in such games: backwards, forwards, left, right, etc. By comparison pages have dozens of links, form fields, menus, etc. It’s not that they can’t be navigated with the keyboard alone, it’s that it’s rarely the most efficient way of doing it. Clicking a link will always be quicker than pressing tab X number of times to select it.

The fact that pressing tab x times is so slow is exactly the point. Our support for keyboard navigation is really crappy.

Re: Fantasy UI

#119

Post by andrepd »

krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

>We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science

If only... Most modern companies seem to ignore any kind of science and thoughtful consideration of their UIs. The only considerations seem to be: (1) looks good on screenshots, and (2) is modern (for some arbitrary definition of modern). The only "scientific" tool they emply A/B testing, blindly and massively.

Look at some reports about beta testing for Windows 95 and you'll see how far we've fallen.

Re: Fantasy UI

#120

Post by DonHopkins »

phailhaus wrote: post #108
DonHopkins wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say that too! Exactly what I was thinking while watching The Expanse (which is a great series), and so many other shows that pander to the cliché of pointlessly transparent phones. Goodbye privacy! Why would you ever want your phone display to be harder for YOU to see, and easier for EVERYONE ELSE to see?

Like how you can just "flick" your screen onto another computer in the same room. Which is a beautiful dream, but...how would that even work?! Everyone just has access to every other device? Or how you can be in a room full of people, but for some reason the holographic display only works for you. And good thing all you want to do is pan and zoom, because that's about as much expressivity you get. It would be hilario…

The late Mark Weiser (head of the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC) described and pioneered that dream, which he called Ubiquitous Computing:

Ubiquitous Computing Demonstration using Tabs, Pads and Boards from 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4_CcNLd2iE&ab_channel=Linus...

The Computer for the 21st Century (Scientific American, September 1991)

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~djp3/classes/2012_09_INF241/papers/...

>Specialized elements of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice their presence.

>The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Tabs, Pads, and Boards

https://norrisnode.com/tabs-pads-and-boards/

>In the post-PC era, we are getting closer to the vision of ubiquitous computing, a termed coined by Mark Weiser in 1988 (a chief scientist at Xerox PARC in the U.S.). Simply put, computing would be on any device, in any location, and in any format.

>We're getting there. During my son's homework this week we created a Word document on an iPad, inserted a photo taken on a Windows phone, saved the doc to the cloud via Dropbox, printed the doc from a laptop over wifi to a printer.

>Weiser helpfully proposed three basic forms for ubiquitous system devices;

>Tabs: wearable centimetre sized devices

>Pads: hand-held decimetre-sized devices

>Boards: metre sized interactive display devices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing

>Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format. A user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop computers, tablets and terminals in everyday objects such as a refrigerator or a pair of glasses. The underlying technologies to support ubiquitous computing include Internet, advanced middleware, operating system, mobile code, sensors, microprocessors, new I/O and user interfaces, computer networks, mobile protocols, location and positioning, and new materials.

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