Coolest interactive platforms in cinema?
July 8, 2014 7:16 PM   Subscribe

Ever come across a scene in a movie and thought that the website or program or interactive "platform" was really cool? First thing that comes to mind of course is that really cool Minority Report scene or this Mission: Impossible software... It doesn't have to be too far into the future, it could be modern.. Could be the graphics that caught your eye, could be the simplicity, could be anything at all..
posted by omar.a to Media & Arts (9 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 


The central make-it-so pit for hellspawn creation in the Hunger Games is pretty baller.
posted by phunniemee at 7:40 PM on July 8, 2014


You might want to take a look at the Sci-Fi Interfaces blog. Me, I'm a big fan of the Bounty Bear.
posted by eschatfische at 7:40 PM on July 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


My favorite is that moment in Avatar when the boss is scrolling the holographic map, overshoots the thing he's trying to show, throws up his hands in frustration and snaps for someone else to operate the damn thing.

Though there are some exceptions like that, the recurring theme I notice in these fictional interactive platforms that they're unworkable. Minority Report left me cold for that reason. The usual issue is that the desired action seems intuitively simple and the interface that produces the action is similarly simple, but on examination of the ways the seemingly-simple action could actually go, the action is actually very complex and/or is just one of a vast range of (intuitively simple) functions that the simple interface is supposed to give the user access to, but it would be completely unable to do that without becoming a complex bloated mess. Or you give it machine-telepathy. (Another in the minority report example: pretend to use that interface for 5 minutes and then see if you can bear to keep your arms up like that for another minute. :) )

I'm pretty sure that scene in avatar was put in expressly to make the technology seem real, the opposite of star-trek / harry potter interfaces.

Another interface that resonates: super-physical ones. People loved those moving gunnery chairs in the Millennium Falcon. (I liked that crammed physical cockpit of the x-wing, though that targeting computer made less than no sense to me).

Crossing those two streams, the Project Ara phone?
posted by anonymisc at 7:58 PM on July 8, 2014


Her. A lot of movie UIs are overly complicated to try to look high-tech, but the stuff in Her is a much more realistic and extremely simplified extrapolation from where we are today.
posted by steveminutillo at 8:03 PM on July 8, 2014


Tron: Legacy's UI designer used to have a page up describing his process for that movie here although it's down right now.

Given that most of the movie takes place inside the computer, the only user interfaces are in the first 20 minutes. But the ones you do see are extremely authentic, like a character using the correct sequence of Unix commands to kill a process, and even a plausible command history for the protagonist's father's computer, which is only on screen for a second.

They put a lot of effort in, clearly, and it actually really helps the weak script. Based on script alone, Encom is just a generic "tech company" with a genius founder. Because of the UI design in the background, it's selling a plausible product. Of course, the rest of the movie isn't very good.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:13 PM on July 8, 2014


I drooled over Tony Stark's workshop in the first Iron Man movie (the scene where he's working on an engine and is using a 3D interface to break apart the schematics).
posted by rakaidan at 9:47 PM on July 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm still waiting for my holographic chess set like from Star Wars.
posted by pompomtom at 10:51 PM on July 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


my very very favourite bits of onscreen tech are the prescient cell phones communicators and tablets PADDs of Star Trek.
posted by glasseyes at 2:46 AM on July 9, 2014


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