Most likely Flash. It's vector based for crisp display on those huge screens and a lot of guys are still very comfortable using it. It's very fast to create mockups with it.
That being said, they could have been using any other product. Perhaps that by "interactive", they simply mean that when you touch the screen, a .mp4 file starts playing. Who knows. I would be interested to find out!
That just made me think...could you poison Google's 'did you mean...' feature that we sometimes use as a defacto spellcheck by seeding the web with a consistently misspelled word all over the place?
Some of this stuff looks like cellphone ui sensibilities. Any real scientist would rather get violent on you than getting shot into space with a device that has the movie equivalent of a spinner gif.
In space? Sure, there's always a lag between what's used when a mission is planned and when it's actually implemented. But I'm including all the scenes on Earth where you have televisions and cell phones, etc. And the GoPros all over Mars? Somehow, I can't see those lasting for 20+ years in NASA's stores.
But seriously, the government is always hopelessly behind on times. Hell, the US Navy paid Microsoft millions in a support contract for XP (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2939435/government-it/u...) earlier this year. Coincidentally, XP was RTM'ed just over 14 years ago.
My view on that is that it simply maintains focus on the story instead of crappily-made-up fake gadgets that a lot of 90's to early 2000's movies did (take Mission to Mars as an appropriate example). Opinion of course, but I think it makes the whole thing feel more "real" to a modern audience.
Thanks for that, I really need to figure out how to make cluster management UI sexy. I've noticed that dashboards are great but unless they are "nice" to look at folks will simply tune them out. There is so much potential with 4k screens these days.
Those UI screens look gorgeous, but are they really practical? By that I mean the software-based buttons. Would they be used in something this critical, surely a physical switch/button (maybe as a backup?) would be far better in this kind of situation?
That being said most of those displays look like information displays rather than control panels.
Most movie UI's have several important restrictions that direct their look and feel as they need to be visible and mostly decipherable by the audience which usually means very large UI elements and over-explanatory graphics and text.
Real current NASA UI probably looks like Java EE / Oracle forms from the late 90's currently with allot of small texts and things that aren't really comprehensible to unfamiliar users.
Film viewers won't really dig a UI which is a bunch of bars and cipher texts that looks like this
alt trj 32523
alt act 34233
tmp cls 4324
tmp int 23
aoa crt 31
It's boring and meaningless and if it's boring and meaningless there's no point of putting it in the film really or investing time in it, on a side note allot of movies that do use boring or meaningless UI's use them to hide easter eggs.
Switches fail, too. It does make sense to move as much as they can to software, since it saves weight and cost and you can have one generic human-input device as opposed to a whole wall of switches, buttons, knobs, and indicators.
The UI designs are cool, however I noticed they misspelled Tempe Terra in some of the maps. I like these kind of videos and the UI designs in many movies are interesting. The ones in Oblivion were especially great. You can find it here: http://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX.
Not bad, but IMO still pretty standard HUD-like user interface. There are thousands of kits for getting a nice kickstart designing those, in vector or VFX [0]. What I like the most is the typography.
The only thing that struck me as silly was Donald Glover's laptop flashing a huge "CALCULATIONS CORRECT" dialog. I did notice at one point something that looked very similar to Lisp code on a screen in the Hermes.
Does anyone else get bothered by the lack of realism in flashy mockups like this? I get that it's 15 years in the future, but are fading ellipses over-imposed on a video of Mars really going to be what NASA looks at to visualize a trajectory?
This goes for the rest of the movie, too: the astrophysicist so nerdy who doesn't understand what a boss is (do those really exist?), why does he need to go to a datacenter to plug in and run a proof verifier, or is the audience deemed so stupid as to not get it or be impressed if he were typing into his computer "coq --verify-proof maneuver.v"? I'm not saying everything needs to be accurate without a hair out of place, but it seems unlikely that moving a file from one laptop to another will animate the application that has the file open in the direction of the other laptop before popping it up there, and it hurts the movie to see it.
I feel as if this movie was a great way to educate people and get them excited about at least a little bit of the details involved in science and space exploration, and really hurt that mission by putting an Equinox gym into space and flashy unrealistic UI's everywhere.
Overall, The Martian got the science pretty close to right and avoided the pitfall of turning astronauts into psychopaths or portraying NASA as a bunch of uniformly suited nerds with pocket protectors. There are nits to be picked, of course. Martian gravity was not accurately portrayed for obvious reasons of cost. Winds are portrayed as having orders of magnitude more force than they would in Martian atmosphere, but it's hard to make the setup work without that. I can live with that.
The one thing that actually bothered me because it was a simple, dumb, mistake that had no real purpose or advantage for the film-makers was this: The units used are all metric, as you'd expect for NASA, except for pressure, which is reported in psi on multiple interface screens and the hab cam dash. Miles were also used in dialogue, but you can sort of justify NASA using miles to communicate with the American public. Myanmar and Liberia will probably abandon imperial before the U.S. finally does.
> Myanmar and Liberia will probably abandon imperial before the U.S. finally does.
Pedantic, perhaps, but the US doesn't use imperial units, its uses US Customary units. These are sometimes identical to imperial units, and in a few cases where they aren't identical sometimes use the same unit name with a different definition for measurements in the same dimension as imperial (e.g., imperial vs. US gallons.)
This is the sort of thing that you know but you forget, and I'm sure it occasionally bites people in the butt. The U.S. doesn't just use out-dated and counter-intuitive units of measurement, it overloads their names with other, slightly different obsolete units of measurement!
The screen graphics are actually the thing that bothered me the most about the film. Some of them were fantastic, some of them were ridiculous.
The CALCULATIONS CORRECT was the worst but there was a clear problem with font sizing in general. The fonts were either way too small on all the detail oriented screens or way too large (whenever the moviegoer was supposed to read something). Just look at the huge overhead screen at mission control. The text is too small for almost anyone in the room to read. Same goes with the control panels in the mars surface vehicle. You may say that SpaceX's Dragon 2 control panel[1] is pretty similar except those screens are at least twice as big and the astronaut is seated extremely close to them.
I'm sure the details of the screens are nice and accurate (they seem to have taken quite a bit of pride in that) but they felt like they were trying to make them so technical looking to impress the audience that they became unusable for the astronauts themselves.
The ridiculous, alignment animating photos from Pathfinder annoyed me greatly too but just because it looked so silly and unnecessary (and I'm normally a fan of animations to add a little extra information to a scene).
That all said, I liked the film. It's not the book but it's about as good of adaptation as I could have hoped for.
It's a little tough with films in particular because you don't really have control over how it will be depicted. Sometimes you might know that a specific shot will be an insert close of a particular panel, but in general the DP and director will shoot coverage however they want to on the day boards or no boards.
You are walking a fine line between believability and something that reads instantly and clearly for the 2 seconds it is on screen.
Films are littered with stuff that will break your suspension of disbelief, depending on your domain of expertise. Unfortunately for those of us that like movies with technology in them, we're gonna be able to pick it apart almost instantly.
They showed supposed UI from Pathfinder displays image blocks of varying sizes in random locations then zooms them all to the right place. It makes a nice effect for the uninitiated, but I have trouble understanding why a computer would act like that.
You can see that the real NASA uses fvwm and xv to display images from Mars.
42 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 38.7 ms ] threadThat being said, they could have been using any other product. Perhaps that by "interactive", they simply mean that when you touch the screen, a .mp4 file starts playing. Who knows. I would be interested to find out!
WPF and/or WinRT and/or Universal Apps.
But seriously, the government is always hopelessly behind on times. Hell, the US Navy paid Microsoft millions in a support contract for XP (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2939435/government-it/u...) earlier this year. Coincidentally, XP was RTM'ed just over 14 years ago.
http://www.territorystudio.com/work/motion/?p=MissionImpossi...
Nice work!
https://medium.com/@HcSwahn_86152/ui-stories-the-martian-eff...
That being said most of those displays look like information displays rather than control panels.
(It is for this reason that it is typically quite ill advised to port UI concepts from movies into real world applications).
Real current NASA UI probably looks like Java EE / Oracle forms from the late 90's currently with allot of small texts and things that aren't really comprehensible to unfamiliar users.
So it would look more like this http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/danteII/images/Images/dan...
Than well this: https://ilikeinterfaces.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/01_02_46...
Film viewers won't really dig a UI which is a bunch of bars and cipher texts that looks like this
alt trj 32523 alt act 34233
tmp cls 4324 tmp int 23
aoa crt 31
It's boring and meaningless and if it's boring and meaningless there's no point of putting it in the film really or investing time in it, on a side note allot of movies that do use boring or meaningless UI's use them to hide easter eggs.
[0] http://videohive.net/item/quantum-hud-infographic/8678174?re...
This goes for the rest of the movie, too: the astrophysicist so nerdy who doesn't understand what a boss is (do those really exist?), why does he need to go to a datacenter to plug in and run a proof verifier, or is the audience deemed so stupid as to not get it or be impressed if he were typing into his computer "coq --verify-proof maneuver.v"? I'm not saying everything needs to be accurate without a hair out of place, but it seems unlikely that moving a file from one laptop to another will animate the application that has the file open in the direction of the other laptop before popping it up there, and it hurts the movie to see it.
I feel as if this movie was a great way to educate people and get them excited about at least a little bit of the details involved in science and space exploration, and really hurt that mission by putting an Equinox gym into space and flashy unrealistic UI's everywhere.
The one thing that actually bothered me because it was a simple, dumb, mistake that had no real purpose or advantage for the film-makers was this: The units used are all metric, as you'd expect for NASA, except for pressure, which is reported in psi on multiple interface screens and the hab cam dash. Miles were also used in dialogue, but you can sort of justify NASA using miles to communicate with the American public. Myanmar and Liberia will probably abandon imperial before the U.S. finally does.
Pedantic, perhaps, but the US doesn't use imperial units, its uses US Customary units. These are sometimes identical to imperial units, and in a few cases where they aren't identical sometimes use the same unit name with a different definition for measurements in the same dimension as imperial (e.g., imperial vs. US gallons.)
I googled but couldn't find it.
[1] https://twitter.com/territorystudio/status/65433800586446438...
The CALCULATIONS CORRECT was the worst but there was a clear problem with font sizing in general. The fonts were either way too small on all the detail oriented screens or way too large (whenever the moviegoer was supposed to read something). Just look at the huge overhead screen at mission control. The text is too small for almost anyone in the room to read. Same goes with the control panels in the mars surface vehicle. You may say that SpaceX's Dragon 2 control panel[1] is pretty similar except those screens are at least twice as big and the astronaut is seated extremely close to them.
I'm sure the details of the screens are nice and accurate (they seem to have taken quite a bit of pride in that) but they felt like they were trying to make them so technical looking to impress the audience that they became unusable for the astronauts themselves.
The ridiculous, alignment animating photos from Pathfinder annoyed me greatly too but just because it looked so silly and unnecessary (and I'm normally a fan of animations to add a little extra information to a scene).
That all said, I liked the film. It's not the book but it's about as good of adaptation as I could have hoped for.
1. http://i.imgur.com/jwhxhkU.jpg
You are walking a fine line between believability and something that reads instantly and clearly for the 2 seconds it is on screen.
Films are littered with stuff that will break your suspension of disbelief, depending on your domain of expertise. Unfortunately for those of us that like movies with technology in them, we're gonna be able to pick it apart almost instantly.
They showed supposed UI from Pathfinder displays image blocks of varying sizes in random locations then zooms them all to the right place. It makes a nice effect for the uninitiated, but I have trouble understanding why a computer would act like that.
You can see that the real NASA uses fvwm and xv to display images from Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Au-S-tjyiU&feature=youtu.be...