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The best bit is the anecdote about LCARS in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was all due to a budget shortfall: "Star Trek also may have helped create the en
by drb311 10y ago
The best bit is the anecdote about LCARS in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was all due to a budget shortfall:
"Star Trek also may have helped create the entire image-under-glass paradigm that governs our digital world. The interface, known as LCARS, is cool-looking. It’s distinctive. And it’s actually the result of a budget shortfall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t have as much money for set design as did the original series, which had panels wired with jewels and glowing buttons. Instead, they cut out film and put them over glass panes."
It's usually constraints, not the lack of them, that give birth to true innovation.
- creshal 10y agoThe LCARS (and its various IRL implementations) is also among the least usable UIs, so I wouldn't exactly call it "true innovation".
- TeMPOraL 10y agoAt least it's consistent and non-distracting, which is something you can rarely say nowadays about IRL user interfaces.
- zyxley 10y agoImagine the logistics of pushing LCARS updates to God-knows-how-many starships and Federation installations.
- noir_lord 10y agoThat could make a fun fanfic. Starfleet Tech Support.
- gvurrdon 10y agoViz magazine (http://viz.co.uk/ http://viz.co.uk/) recently did a strip wherein a thinly-disguised Enterprise and crew are obliged to beam up Captain Thomas T. Cook and his landing party in the face of danger, but his messages requesting help come through via email to Outlook Express...
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoThey have had full natural language AI in every Star Trek franchise - except maybe the Scott Bakula one ( Enterprise? ) which I didn't watch . So I'd think updates would be largely a solved problem. Heck, the computer might patch itself.
- ivoras 10y agoThe thing is: whenever you see it on-screen, the people using it are happy with it, not frustrated, not fighting it, and that is truly "good UX" (within the suspension of disbelief of the show). In other words: it shows that, if people react to a UI like they do in the show, that's the perfect UI.
- jdbernard 10y agoThat's a critical assumption though and I'm not sure it holds. People in shows are scripted to react that way, it's not a natural reaction.
- throwanem 10y agoBut that's just the point. If you have real-world users reacting to your real-world interface in the same way that TNG's scripted users (generally) react to their prop interface, you're probably doing something right.
- jdbernard 10y agoDefinitely. I agree. I just meant that you just can't go the other way: use the reactions from the shows as endorsement of the interface.
- djsumdog 10y agoI've only seen LCARS themes, but I do like the concept that everything is displayed on a screen, at once, with no overlapping windows. Overlapping windows are the worst possible UI decision ever. I've been using tiling window managers for four years now and I never want to go back.
- barrkel 10y agoOverlapping windows in a cascade (so the bottom left corners act a bit like a tab selector) are my preferred window layout. Random overlapping doesn't work particularly well. Any time you have to manage the z-index of more than one window, something has gone wrong. Thus cascading. I can't stand tiling though. Either everything is too small, or you can't get enough stuff on screen at once.
- creshal 10y ago> I can't stand tiling though. Either everything is too small, or you can't get enough stuff on screen at once. Or everything has the wrong aspect ratio.
- r00fus 10y agoWhy would you want cascading windows over tabbed interfaces (e.g.: any modern browser)? What does it actually buy you?
- yoz-y 10y agoFor me overlapping windows are better for using two applications at the same time - copy pasting, drag and dropping between them etc. This is because their position is deterministic. Tabs are better when I have a boatload of unrelated pages (e.g.: tabs). This is also why I find tabbed interfaces in code editors useless.
- elsurudo 10y agoI find tabbed editors useful in that they allow you to open the current "working set" of files, and then disregard the rest of the project files. After I open up the working set, I usually close the tree view (Sublime, in my case) so my code has more room.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoAnother thing: the original Star Trek brought the very concept of teleportation into mainstream attention and it was also due to a budgeting issue - they didn't have money to shoot sequences of Enterprise landing or sending shuttles down to the planet, so they invented a workaround...
- armenarmen 10y agoIt reminds me of The Lean Startup where IMVU couldn't roll out walking animation quickly enough, so they had avatars teleport and users thought it was more advanced than second life and the sims. Got to love work around a that really work
- digi_owl 10y agoEither IMVU has changed massively since i poked at it, or the comparison to Sims is way out there...
- blakeyrat 10y agoDoctor Who beat them to that same solution some years before. I'm not entirely sure, but the first show I remember having the budget to show the characters actually taking ships to their destination each time was Space: 1999, where the "Eagle" shuttles were ubiquitous. (It beat Battlestar Galactica by a few years.)
- mjevans 10y agoDidn't Babylon 5 have frequent CG sequences relating to ships docking and even landing on planets? (Granted they probably reused, maybe from different angles and with small changes, a lot of those sets).
- blakeyrat 10y ago... yes? But considering Space: 1999 came out literally 20 years earlier, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
- ianphughes 10y agoThe LCARS display has a special place in my family. A few years back, my wife had a follow-up interview that landed on Halloween at Ubisoft. She was informed, "Don't be surprised if people are in costume and you should consider it too, if you feel so inclined." She slapped on a TNG Combadge and re-designed her resume to look like a LCARS display and said, "Hey, it worked for their production when they were in a pinch." She accepted an offer a few days later.
- jhallenworld 10y agoIt's true for real devices also: touch screens and other capacitive touch sensors are way cheaper than real buttons.