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Fantasy UI
- sxp 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/FUI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FUI/ has many more examples if you're a fan of FUIs.
- idiocrat 6y agoMicrosoft is one trillion worth, but can offer only laughable Metro UI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AItTqnTsVjA
- zapzupnz 6y agoDoes the maker of the video also write blog posts or anything? I'm very into this topic and I skimmed through the video, but I'm not sure I want to be essentially yelled at for an hour and a half.
- idiocrat 6y agoI do not necessarily like to be yelled at either, but he is an extraordinary case. In fact it is not as bad as it sounds, if you can filter out the presentation form over contents. For me it was worth watching, as he makes really strong points, resonating with my expectation about UI. I do not think he has this in written form.
- another_kel 6y agoUpon seeing the title I was hyped up but unfortunatelly it's just another yelling dude complaining about surface level stuff being not the way he likes.
- underwater 6y agoThere is a delicious irony to a someone sharing their critique about bad interfaces in such an audience hostile format.
- noodles_nomore 6y agoI'm watching almost any video on 2.5-3x speed nowadays, which is faster than reading. Look for the 'Video Speed Controller' Firefox plugin.
- zapzupnz 6y agoI find reading faster and more useful (I can skim for key words, I can look for headings, I can inspect images for as long as I want) and less mentally taxing than listening to a normally-pitched reading by Alvin and the Chipmunks. :D
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- underwater 6y agoMetro is terrible as a desktop and tablet UI, but was fantastic for mobile interfaces. Microsoft's mistake was thinking UIs would converge across form factors.
- blauditore 6y agoI still believe the overall vision is/was good. They just would have had to make a few more compromises, like some additional optimizations for desktop where users could profit more from mouse and keybaord. But another factor was that the change was just to deep of a cut, and the world was just not ready for it. People were overwhelmed when they were expected to suddenly use magic corners and gestures instead of clicking a button. If it would have been a slower change, it might have worked out better.
- zapzupnz 6y agoSeems like Microsoft thought if people could stomach the transition from XP to Vista/7, then the transition to 8 would be taken with the same amount of initial resistance followed by acceptance. There's only so many times you can tell your customers that their hardware isn't up to snuff for your software, whether in terms of computational capability or interaction modality, in the same decade!
- BruceEel 6y agoNice. Some look sort of acid/trippy but others look very slick and eh, super-usable. I'd love to play with an actual implementation. Something Dear ImGui-sh would be great...
- Apocryphon 6y agoI feel like from the 70s-00s alone there are enough examples of fantasy UI and Hollywood OSes to fill a nice thick coffee table with.
- christophilus 6y agoI would buy a big hardcover book of these, if it existed.
- naikus 6y agoPlease do one on Westworld UI!
- krm01 6y agoAs 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) and you had to figure out the navigation on each website you visited. Today, everything looks and feels the same and we lost the creative spirit of interface building. Figuring out the interface might not be best practice. But at the same time, I remember sharing websites with friends purely based on how fun the navigation and overall controls were. We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science. There are arguments for both sides. My wish is that... Hopefully.. one day, someone will contact us with a project that allows us to build the first fantasy UI for a real-world SaaS product.
- mym1990 6y agoI also remember the times you are reminiscing about. I would go look up lists of top innovative websites in a given month and just be blown away with the moving pieces and interaction. But...from a consulting and a developer perspective, the marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective. If you could figure out a truly compelling reason to spend 100 more budget hours to build that cool doodad and make it work across 100 devices and 10 browsers, great! But truth be told, it is already hard to build interfaces with moving elements that work across the 57 iPhone screens, 60 Windows screens, 10 browsers, well you get my point... There are still many mind blowing projects out there with cool interfaces though...we did not lose the art of interface building. It just isn't where you are looking for it.
- flobosg 6y agoThe 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 https://imgur.com/a/PF3oA [2]: https://imgur.com/a/uDeBs https://imgur.com/a/uDeBs
- hypertele-Xii 6y agoNice! In similar vein I compiled a study of Observation's fantasy UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGozb4rwmAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGozb4rwmAc
- lordleft 6y agoAbsolutely loved the typography and UI of NGE.
- yccs27 6y agoOthers are pointing out that Fantasy UIs have too much complexity to serve as your average productivity tool interface, and that an artistic design hurts usability. Yet there is a subset of usable interfaces which look a lot like the examples on this website: Game UIs. I find it fascinating how artistic vision and interaction design can combine.
- tomaszs 6y agoImpressive work on the topic. Thanks for sharing that
- m4r35n357 6y agoDoes no-one here remember the Enlightenment window manager in the 1990s?
- arethuza 6y agoI rather like the UI for the Cave in His Dark Materials (possible spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSpIaCf47lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSpIaCf47lc
- unklefolk 6y agoI've always wondered who does those browsers / email clients / phone UIs you see in films and on TV that are kind of familiar but also not "real" software. I'm talking about everyday films - not futuristic fantasy. Often when someone writes an email in a film the UI is some kind of Frankenstein interface that isn't recognisable as say Gmail or Outlook. Am I just imagining this? Is there a company that specializes in writing fake UIs for films and TV?
- rbrambila 6y agoI’m currently working on an FUI for a short film with those sorts of principles in mind - a more “realistic” interpretation of what you might call “every day software” (in this case it’s for a call center of sorts). There’s a sci-fi element but very much grounded in current day technologies so it’s the furthest thing away from the typical Marvel FUI. One of the hardest challenges is making the UI “read” in film - that is getting the point of the action across while trying to remain truthful to some sort of sense of functionality. Oh, and also making it look interesting and/or feel original :) Here’s an unused direction for that “call center” UI based on NeXT/Win95- I’ve actually since shifted to something quite different (more of a backend web app feel from the mid 2000s I’d say) for the final look but still thought it’d be fun to share this initial glimpse: https://twitter.com/ftrsprvln/status/1336366361635786752?s=21 https://twitter.com/ftrsprvln/status/1336366361635786752?s=2...
- ReDeiPirati 6y agoStrange that nobody on this thread shared the amazing eDEX-UI project: https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui. A full open-source sci-fi terminal emulator inspired by Tron Legacy.
- wincy 6y agoHah yeah I remember downloading that and reading the disclaimer that you shouldn't do any real work on this seeing as how it has a virtual keyboard showing your password keypresses, scifi UIs are cool but not practical at all.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoMy fantasy UI would be a sort of large flat desktop plane, with ~infinite zoom. FVWM and other do have the one large desktop space that you scroll around, instead of discrete virtual desktops, but I want to see the ultimate version of that. A vast virtual plane that you could scroll and zoom around, drag your files/content around, make groups with marked delineations like a map. Obviously there would be some kind of grouping and minimap if you zoomed out enough. Documents should be represented such that you would simply zoom into them to access their content, you wouldn't open files or start applications, everything would be represented visually and the editing tools you need would be presented as you zoom close enough. A document would be represented as pages you could flip through or spread out for a larger overview. Videos could be simply viewed or spread out into frames/segments with editing tools. Content would not be a "text file" or an "image file", it would just be a delineated piece of content, which you could add whatever type of content to, by calling up the relevant tools. There would be no discrete applications as such, just content and flexibility, I want it to be seamless and integrated. In some ways similar to UIs seen in Minority Report and other sci-fi movies, but without the Hollywood flash and gimmickry. I'm aware that there are a lot of complications and practical limitations, but it's an idea I've toyed with for a while, and I'm not sure I've seen people really attempt something like it for practical use, only bits and pieces.
- depressedpanda 6y agoYes, very much this. I don't have much to add except that I wonder why something similar hasn't been done already? I mean, it's an UI that works fine in RTS games, so why wouldn't it work for application windows?
- nottorp 6y agoIt would be pretty maddening to keep losing the application you're working on because of the infinite scroll. In RTS games you have keyboard shortcuts to return to your unit groups, bases etc to mitigate that, but there you're supposed to jump between points of interest while for general use you tend to keep the same point of interest for a long time...
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI remember an app called Kaleidoscope, for Mac. It created "fantasy" UIs that actually worked. Some were pretty cool. Most were completely unusable. https://archive.org/details/tucows_204231_Kaleidoscope https://archive.org/details/tucows_204231_Kaleidoscope https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=25 https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=25
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThe 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.
- Fnoord 6y agoBecause the transparency has no function in these cases. Functional transparency example would be AR. For example navigation or car HUD on computer aided glasses.
- DonHopkins 6y agoI 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?
- omni 6y agoIt's a cliché not because it's a vision of the future, but because it's a good filmmaking technique that lets the audience easily see what's going on when you have characters interacting with tiny pocket screens. Without transparent screens, you'd need to do something like what the recent Sherlock series did and have giant text bubbles pop up on the screen or something, which would not fit with the aesthetic of a show like The Expanse.
- phailhaus 6y agoLike 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 hilarious to have a scene where they struggle to get it to work, a future equivalent of "Can everyone see my screen?"
- tinus_hn 6y agoStrange to see the Star Trek LCARS interface isn’t on the list
- neilalexander 6y agoIf you haven’t seen them, look at the Microsoft Future Vision concepts for some quite interesting ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tFdreZB94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tFdreZB94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 To me, what makes these fantasy UIs compelling is that they are usually extremely context-aware and content-aware. We haven’t quite worked out how to make real world computers work that way yet. We’re still very much tied to paradigms that are ultimately easier for the computer (apps, windows, menus, files) as opposed to things that are natural to humans. If I have one hope for ML, it’s that hopefully it will bring some context-awareness to computing so that the content becomes the user interface.
- noodles_nomore 6y agoSurprisingly hollow. There is almost no information on the screens to indicate what any swipe or touch might do. Explains a lot about their decisions in Windows 8/10. Their ideal is magic bullshit.
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- dukeofdoom 6y agoI'm looking for alien/space looking UI interface. And music visualizers for my youtube video projects. I've been compiling visually interesting/fantasy computer animations for youtube videos made with pygame. So far I've found 1. Matrix Effect https://gist.github.com/MrKioZ/c07b9377d20bab53af6ebcdfbdeabb64 https://gist.github.com/MrKioZ/c07b9377d20bab53af6ebcdfbdeab... 2. Star Field effect https://codeboje.de/starfields-and-galaxies-python/ https://codeboje.de/starfields-and-galaxies-python/ 3. Earth Animation https://makersportal.com/blog/2018/8/16/rotating-globe-in-python-using-basemap-toolkit https://makersportal.com/blog/2018/8/16/rotating-globe-in-py...
- ChrisArchitect 6y agosee also Kit FUI from waay back https://www.saji8k.com/kit-fui/ https://www.saji8k.com/kit-fui/
- hertzrat 6y agoThese are not fantasy UIs, they are science fiction UIs. There is a massive lack of good swords and wizards fantasy movies and shows. The networks, just to fill out a list, are clumping fantasy in with science fiction and super hero movies. If we are going to say anything involving an unrealistic personal fantasy is fantasy, then why stop there? That’s almost all movies and film. For that matter super hero stuff ends up in science fiction too - Heinlein is not going to be rolling in his grave but it’s still not the same thing either
- MattRix 6y agoThey are fantasy UIs, you’ve just forgotten that fantasy is a real word with a specific meaning and not just a genre of fiction.
- hertzrat 6y agoLike I said, almost all art is fantasy then, and almost all science fiction isn’t scientific enough to qualify. And all stories have drama too, so we might as well clump almost everything into a “dramatic fantasy” bucket in that case. The genre names aren’t perfect but repurposing them to be more English-accurate isn’t helping people find what they’re looking for
- MattRix 6y agoYes but we aren’t talking about a genre, that’s the point you’re missing.
- michaelchisari 6y agoHer is my all-time favorite movie UI. It's more familiar and less futuristic than the others but felt like where we're headed. There's also just enough emphasis on skeuomorphism to make it feel warmer and more inviting than the flat designs prevalent in 2013. https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2018/04/05/screen-graphics-of-her-interview-with-geoff-mcfetridge.html https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2018/04/05/screen-graphics-of...
- lordleft 6y agoI dig a lot of these interfaces, but I'm a huge fan of simplistic CLI interfaces in sci-fi. Like fallout. I find it infinitely charming -- I love the idea of someone running Unix in the year 2983 or something
- bdickason 6y agoThis is interesting. Would love to see an interview with Dino Ignacio / Deadspace which has a super futuristic in-game UI.
- WalterGR 6y agoWhat 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?
- anthk 6y agoA lot of fantasy UI's were a reality back in the day with FVWM. Check their gallery, and look up FVWM screenshots in the net. Proof: https://www.deviantart.com/xevz/art/FVWM-2-5-14-X-org-6-8-2-24148266 https://www.deviantart.com/xevz/art/FVWM-2-5-14-X-org-6-8-2-... https://www.deviantart.com/topperharley999/art/FVWM https://www.deviantart.com/topperharley999/art/FVWM
- jordache 6y agoAnyone know what kind of technologies are used to build these fantasy UIs? There are probably two categories: - UIs that are live on the set, and the talent interacts with them - UIs that are added in post, so essentially animated clips that align with the on screen action. Adobe After Effects come to mind for the 2D UI. {{3D app of choice for the 3d visuals}} Not sure what else are used for these output. Would be crazy if some of them get built with common web technology.
- jnurmine 6y agoUsually any UI in a movie is bad and drops me back to reality out of the magic of the movie. There are meaningless percentages with silly labels, animated histograms, so much useless movement, scrolling nonsense, and sometimes even a world map, blinking stuff -- all crammed into one screen. And best of all, the useless extra data is often rendered extra useless with a font size that is too tiny to read without a magnifying glass. There are movies with nice, (semi) plausible fantasy UIs too! For example, The Midnight Sky (damage assessment, map views etc.), Chappie (firmware upgrade, policebot PoV, etc.), Interstellar (flight controls, robot "debug" displays etc.). Star Trek LCARS screens have been generally well thought of, but not always. There are weird numbers and "display nonsense" here and there. But, I can believe a starship could be steered with such a touch UI with clearly distinguishable big buttons and clear separation of functions.
- Osiris 6y agoI worked at a startup that hired a designer that worked on Tron Legacy to design the main product interface and we built it. It's a very complex UI with lots of graphs and information and it was damn sexy and the information was actually useful.