drucker.ca

A recent paper by Michael Schmitz, a stu­dent at Saar­land Uni­ver­sity (a fas­ci­nat­ing insti­tu­tion near the bor­ders of Ger­many, France, Lux­em­bourg and Bel­gium), sur­veys sev­eral dif­fer­ent user inter­faces from sci­ence fic­tion movies through­out film his­tory. Human Com­puter Inter­ac­tion in Sci­ence Fic­tion Movies cites sev­eral films, includ­ing Metrop­o­lis, Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix, Logan’s Run, For­bid­den Planet, Gat­taca, Minor­ity Report, Total Recall, Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion (one of the movies, I assume), X-Men, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dark Star, the 2002 remake of The Time Machine, and even Galaxy Quest.

It is intrigu­ing the way Schmitz has orga­nized the UIs he is tak­ing note of:

The movie clips in the main sec­tion of his sur­vey are cat­e­go­rized accord­ing to their area of real-life appli­ca­tions and research:
Neuro Tech­nol­ogy: Tech­nolo­gies that con­nect to brains are intro­duced here.
Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion: Elec­tron­i­cal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of indi­vid­u­als
Dis­plays: Var­i­ous kinds of dis­plays as an out­put medium
Speech: Includ­ing speech syn­the­sis and recog­ni­tion as well as intel­li­gent assistants/avatars as spe­cial sub­group.
Other I/O tech­nolo­gies: All tech­nolo­gies that are more spe­cialised and that were dif­fi­cult to cat­e­go­rize accord­ing to the fields above, for exam­ple ges­ture recog­ni­tion or tan­gi­ble user interfaces

I think these cat­e­gories arose because of the scenes that he chose to include. There are per­haps some other movies that were not cho­sen that may have brought in other areas of clas­si­fi­ca­tion (for instance, Tron, Blade Run­ner, Seren­ity, any of the Star Wars films, The Fifth Ele­ment, Ghost in the Shell, any of the James Bond films, 12 Mon­keys or Con­tact).

The fact is, the UIs that we often see in the movies are not always accu­rate because they aren’t nec­es­sar­ily built for good usabil­ity, but instead for good dra­matic effect. Sure, Tom Cruise could have done some of his research in Minor­ity Report using a mouse and an LCD screen, but it was so much more dra­matic for him to don VR gloves, and per­form the exhaust­ing 3D manip­u­la­tion in vir­tual space in front of him. Even every­day, mun­dane events like receiv­ing an email get full-screen 3D ani­ma­tions in the movie Dis­clo­sure with Michael Dou­glas and Demi Moore in 1994.

Nev­er­the­less, movies do have a way of plac­ing imagery and expec­ta­tions in the mind of many movie view­ers. In fact, because a sur­pris­ingly large num­ber of peo­ple can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between movies and real­ity, some of these UI inven­tions may be adopted sooner after they are devel­oped for real, every­day use. What James Bond sees on his com­puter screen may very well be built by some small startup deter­mined to bring just such a tool to mar­ket, at what­ever price the pub­lic wants to pay. They know they want it, though, because they saw it work just fine at the theatre.