CERN GUIs in Angels & Demons

May 16, 2009 4:56 PM

I just watched the Angels & Demons movie starring Tom Hanks. The first part takes place at the CERN collider, and shows many very cool and stylish computer graphics on the screens of the operators. Where can I find more about these GUIs? Are they real, or just movie glitz?
posted by Emera Gratia to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Glitz.

CERN uses the ROOT toolkit and (I think) QT for all GUI stuff.
posted by Loto at 5:04 PM on May 16 [2 favorites]

(I haven't watched the movie. I'm not a real particle physicist either.)

For the Tevatron (the accelerator at Fermilab) most of the basic status information is displayed on Channel 13, which is shown on TVs throughout the facility. The formatting is a bit nicer for the version they display on TV, but the information is the same as the link. Mostly just numbers: luminosities, energies, rates of antiproton generation, etc.

I believe there is software that will graphically recreate collisions, but I don't know anything about it.
posted by kiltedtaco at 5:21 PM on May 16

Another vote for glitz. I haven't seen the movie either, but I have never seen a GUI written by/for physicists that went much past the bare minimum. Funds and time just don't allow it.
posted by crinklebat at 5:47 PM on May 16

I'm actually not sure I've seen any realistic GUI in any film. Plus, science tends to not involve a lot of fancy GUIs. Plus, the science in Angels & Demons is already (in)famously bad, so I'd be genuinely shocked if anything you saw had any meaningful relation to reality.
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:52 PM on May 16 [2 favorites]

I'm actually not sure I've seen any realistic GUI in any film.

Thirded. Except for Office Space and it's funny hybrid of MacOS / Windows.
posted by randomstriker at 6:20 PM on May 16

Odds are good they're glitz. Even where real programs are referenced in shows and movies, they make up a 'cool' interface for the cameras. For example, CSI often references a bullet identification software named IBIS; I worked for the company that makes IBIS and lemme tell you, it is FAR more prosaic than the schmancy 3D graphics they show the actors looking at.
posted by Billegible at 6:25 PM on May 16 [1 favorite]

I'm a screenwriter. Without seeing the movie, I can almost guarantee you that anything you see on a computer screen in a movie has been handcrafted to communicate what the filmmakers needed to communicate. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any functioning software. It is all about communicating plot points to the audience in the clearest possible way.
posted by musofire at 6:34 PM on May 16 [1 favorite]

Here's an example of an actual display at CERN, specifically from the Large Hadron Collider.
posted by zsazsa at 7:09 PM on May 16 [3 favorites]

I'm actually not sure I've seen any realistic GUI in any film.

Antitrust had some pretty accurate Linux GUI (I can't remember if it was KDE or Gnome) and terminal sequences. Other than that it isn't a movie worth watching.
posted by thewalledcity at 7:38 PM on May 16

I also have not seen the movie, but I concur from my professional experience that it's a load of movie magic hooey.

* The GUI would have to be clear enough to communicate what it needs to.
* The GUI would have to render on a monitor whose frame rate wouldn't screw up the film camera's frame rate, and the DP wouldn't ever compromise his shot for the GUI's sake.
* The GUI would have to be licensed from its manufacturer (or alternately, it could be product placement).
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:28 PM on May 16

A friend of mine has spent time working at CERN. After watching the trailer for the movie, he commented on how much cooler the movie GUI looked than the real GUI does.
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:09 PM on May 16

(hoping this is apropos the question)

I'm actually not sure I've seen any realistic GUI in any film.

The famously mocked "this is a unix system, I know this" GUI from Jurassic Park was a real 3d filesystem explorer made by SGI for their Irix variant of Unix, called FSN. There is an open source version for OSX and Linux called FSV.
posted by idiopath at 10:21 PM on May 16

Firewall and the second Matrix (yes, really) had some fairly accurate representations of a Unix/Linux CLI.

But, yes, most likely it was glitz. There's a good bit in one of the Battlestar Galactica podcasts where Ron Moore discusses how they came up with the visual style of the DRADIS computer system (this is the ship's radar/sensor screen, shows where external things are and identifies them).

They evaluated several real-world systems used by the navy and airforce for similar purposes and, while these all had a graphical component, the sheer volume of information that needs to be conveyed in a real situation was overwhelming visually and wouldn't have come across as clearly on-screen.
posted by odinsdream at 6:04 AM on May 17