I remember the days when all the flash websites looked like this. With all the pixel fonts of 8 px height.
http://www.2advanced.com/ Was one of my favorites! (I can't even see it now as the flash is blocked by Chrome)
I actually miss that style, good thing it still exists in movies. Oblivion had also very nice GUI's. But Gmunk has a lot of other great work!
I like the style too. I couldn't use the 2advanced site, because, while it loaded after I accepted Flash (Firefox), everything was tiny on my high-resolution screen, and zooming did nothing.
For someone who wants an in-depth look at sci-fi interfaces from a designer's perspective, https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/ and the corresponding book [1] are pretty good resources. The book was even featured on YC's Winter (Summer?) reading list.
Oh hey I run this, originally I was just collecting the fui designs for reference when trying to make my own as a desktop (https://github.com/seenaburns/dex-ui), but since then I've kept it going.
This is an incredible and timely resource for me. I'm currently building a spaceship cockpit for my young sons. I'm a former EE, so I've got the blinky LEDs, switches, LCDs, keypads, and other physical UI components covered, but I'd love to add a sophisticated GUI component. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a coder. Do you know if any sci-fi GUIs are available as Android apps for tablets? I have 3 Kindle Fire tablets that I would love to turn into dedicated GUI touchscreens for the cockpit.
I set up SquareHome 2 with Minimalistic Text widgets to be kind of a retro-futuristic control panel for my phone. I'll bet with some time and the right icon packs it would make a pretty nice cockpit HUD.
Thanks for the tip! I just installed Artemis on 3 tablets and it's fantastic for my purposes. And looking at the Artemis forums, there are a number of people building Star Trek-like bridge consoles, similar to what I'm doing. Except I'm aiming for more of a gritty Alien type of aesthetic.
There's an overarching theme here of thin neon lines and white text on black background. Its interesting to me that despite the popularity of this in movies as the default "futuristic" computer interface, it rarely seems to make its way into actual software and especially web/app UI. One exception i can think of is the Bloomberg terminal.
I find this odd because its easier on the eyes and looks better. I would honestly prefer "night mode" for pretty much all software (ms office, the whole internet, etc). Gmail black theme looks great but the actually emails are still white background / black font...
Im not really a hacker... Does anyone know good "night mode" software or settings? There is one in windows 10 but it only applies to settings windows and not the file browser or much anything else.
I know this doesn't apply to your needs, however OSX/macOS has the ability to "Invert Display Color" and I use it all the time for precisely the use case you described.
some digging around I found Stylish [1] chrome extension which allows you to select dark modes (and others) for many common websites. Unfortunately many of the dark themes are really just dark grey, whereas I really prefer a deep inky black. My pixel xl has an amoled display which makes night modes look stunning because the pixels actually turn off with true black.
I used this app [2] to read hacker news and im delighted to find they have a web interface as well which has a dark mode
A while back I roughed up a dark theme for HN via a greasemonkey userscript, as seen here: http://i.imgur.com/PkwVEOD.png There are obviously some rough edges—no pun intended—such as around the voting buttons.
Dark themes really are just way easier on the eyes. Combining the Windows 10 dark theme, the black theme in Office 2016, Firefox Developer Edition, plus a bunch of dark themes for web sites yields a pretty good overall experience.
The standard answer here will be to have Flux, but that doesn't really accomplish what you are looking for.
I think once you start setting OLED on the desktop, you'll begin to see more work being done in this area.
I am also a huge fan of dark backgrounds; under the right circumstances. It can make you really focus in on specific content if the interface is minimalistic in its approach.
Fun fact: there were no computers involved in the making of 2001. They were too expensive at the time. All of the monitors in the movie were actually back-projected film screens. All of the wiredframe 3D models were literally wire models, painted white, filmed and then projected on the screen.
Using back-projected screens meant 2001 had flat screens which still look modern today --as opposed to the bulbous CRT monitors used in Blade a Runner and Alien.
These are great 'low tech' interfaces. Now if you want a great 'advanced' interface think anything in the Cyberpunk genre, hard to beat direct brain interactions. Who needs clumsy words and floating pictures :)
What is the nature of the thought you want to transmit? How do you make sure that you are not transmitting idle day dreams? How can you be sufficiently precise for a computer?
Remember Firefox (Clint Eastwood movie) where you have to think in Russian to launch the weapons (spoiler!). Well, suppose you casually "thought" the word "shoot" or "fire" or whatever the Russian equivalent is?
Suppose your friend -- Maverick -- is goofing around with you and you're both in an inverted dive and you just think. "Oh that guy. Sometimes, I just want to launch at him."
The best way to interface is with language! You should have to say the command out loud or to type it out. That way you are being precise and deliberate.
Of course, it would be even better if you have a specialized language that was free of the ambiguity of human speech...
You can (and should) ask those questions about any kind of UI.
How to make sure you don't hit the wrong button?
What happens if the image recognition misinterprets your gesture?
What happens if the voice recognition can't understand context and misinterprets things as commands? (Hey, turns out the last one is a real problem people struggle with at the moment)
That's why the field of UI design exists at all - and I don't think neural interfaces would be any exception to that: They will require their own kind of UI design.
Of course today, we don't know much about the possible design primitives, but I could imagine it becoming interesting...
I am almost certain that I would hate using the Minority Report interface, as it was depicted in the film. If Tom Cruise's character actually had to use that every day, his deltoids would be the size of bowling balls.
And I'm sure his manager loves to see exactly what he's doing from 100m away.
If you stuck that UI into a pair of VR-AR goggles, and replaced the huge gorilla-arm movements with barely-visible finger twitches, I might consider it.
I've always felt the same way. Looks really cool, and probably a lot more appropriate for a movie than what people would really use, but really awkward and impractical for the tasks it's supposed to help accomplish.
It's sort of like having to swing a Wiimote to swing a sword in a game. Initial novelty value is great, but after a while, if you could do the same thing by simply pushing a button, why wouldn't you just push a button? No matter how good the motion tracking is, if it's not the most efficient way to accomplish the task, there's no point to it.
Aside from how cool it looks and the cinematic qualities that made it appropriate for the movie, everything he used that UI for could have been done much more efficiently with a mouse and keyboard-based UI.
I've had a job that involved pressing buttons and turning knobs on a tall stack of test equipment. It did make my shoulders sore if I had to do that repeatedly for too long. Luckily I was able to hook the equipment up to a computer and automate the repetitive parts.
I want a VR interface that merely simulates a room full of monitors, controlled via a workout machine to keep me in shape while generating 30 watts to power the headset - or potentially the whole system.
>The greatest UI in the history of films cannot be captured visually: it is the UI in Spike Jonze's "Her".
No, that was the absolute worst UI in the history of films. Spoken words simply cannot carry remotely as much information as visually-seen images. Haven't you ever heard the saying "a picture is worth 1000 words"?
Let me give a modern-day example: at a typical Panera Bread restaurant right now, you can order a sandwich either by talking to some teenager at the counter, or by using the touchscreen kiosk. Panera lets you customize sandwiches heavily, by changing the bread, adding cheeses, changing/adding toppings, etc. So I walk into a Panera and would like to order a tuna sandwich but I want to see all the different options and make it completely customized. They have probably 20 different kinds of bread alone, not to mention all the other options. So which do you think is more efficient, having some teenager rattle off 20 kinds of bread, or looking at them on a screen? And how do I know what these breads are anyway? How long is it going to take for some teenager to tell me what all those things are, and maybe show me samples, compared to just looking at some photos on the screen? How about just verifying the order? With the teenager, how long will it take him to read off the entire order to me, and what is the possibility that the information will be received incorrectly because I can't hear him that well, he speaks with an accent or lisp, there's too much noise, or he just misspeaks or skips something? With a screen, I can see the order printed out exactly.
The teenager has a job, which is a small but positive increment in the health of your community. For that, I would be willing to endure the (real) risks you mention.
Yeah I'd rather have the teenager (or, actually, since it's been awhile since I saw a fast food clerk under the age of 40, the probable mom of several teenagers) for that reason.
Even though it may be more efficient for the customer to have the touch screen, I don't think service automation is so black and white.
So you're willing to suffer reduced inefficiency just so someone else has a job? Why not just hire the teenager to stand around doing nothing then? Then you get the benefits of both!
Risks? I also cited actual, real benefits. How do I order my sandwich with a different kind of bread with the teenager? I don't. It's not possible. The customers behind me will get very mad if I ask the teenager to list off all 20 different kinds of bread, and to show them all to me personally too. The teenager likely will not do as I ask here, plus it's a massive waste of my time too. Ordering from humans works OK when you have a very short and simple menu so there's little chance for confusion, but this means it's quite impossible to have a lot of selection.
How about this idea: let's get rid of computer monitors, and replace them with verbal-only interfaces. How well do you think it's going to work out if you want to order a pair of shoes on Amazon.com (or any online store) when you can't even see them, and just have something reading text into your ear? Or, because you're so concerned about employment, maybe we should ban computer users from reading monitors, and require them to hire people to read stuff from the screen to them!
Finally, would you mind if I came over and smashed your car windows? You shouldn't; you should be happy, because that means someone will have a job replacing those windows.
There is a difference between digging a ditch and working on a rockpile. One has dignity--it is useful work one is paid for; the other is a punishment.
I don't, in fact, think it's wise to automate the people behind sandwich counters out of a job; it doesn't follow from that that I would prefer a pneumatic tube to my computer monitor.
I acknowledged that the benefits you cited were real, by using the word "real." I assure you I'm not some kind of paperclip-AI-zealot when it comes to employing people for tasks that could be automated.
I wonder if there is any level of peristent unemployment--25%, say? at which you would prefer to halt the growth of the kind of automation which is drying up the job pool? Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind sandwich counters? Enjoy the bread selection.
I'm sorry, I just don't see the point in keeping people uselessly employed doing tasks that are better done by machines. Do you think we should stop using travelocity.com and go back to using travel agents? Do you think we should make Domino's stop taking orders over the web or phone app and go back to only taking orders over the phone? Do you think we should eliminate banking ATMs, and go back to making people show up during banker's hours and talk to a teller? Do you think we should eliminate self-checkout lanes at grocery stores(/Walmart/etc.) and go back to having fully-manned checkout lanes? Were you complaining about all these things before, or did you only start when touchscreen kiosks started showing up in chain eateries? ATMs, in particular, go back to the 1980s. How about pumping gas? Are you opposed to self-service gas stations too?
How is there any "dignity" in doing a job that's better and more conveniently (to the customer) done by automation, or by the customer themselves (pumping gas)? That's nothing more than make-work. If you want to put people to work, give them something to do that isn't so easily done by machine. I can come up with plenty of suggestions offhand: 1) like in the New Deal, we could employ people fixing up the National Park system. Building benches, improving hiking trails, building park buildings, etc., aren't things easily done by current machines. 2) America's infrastructure is in atrocious shape. Tons of bridges desperately need to be replaced. Lots of people could be employed in construction here. Bridges can't be built by robots yet (or any time soon since they're all one-off projects and vary so much, plus they're so huge). 3) There's supposedly a shortage of nurses. Send some people to nursing school. You only need a 2-year degree for the entry-level jobs. We don't have robots yet which can start an IV or do a sponge-bath. 4) We need more mass transit in this country. Put people to work building tunnels for subways and building subway stations.
>Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind sandwich counters? Enjoy the bread selection.
Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind bank counters? Enjoy your cash from the ATM. If you use ATMs, or your bank's website, or your bank's phone app, then you're a hypocrite.
Guilty as charged. Before my bank had an ATM, I organized my time differently, but I survived.
As for dignity, it's not versus "a job that can be more efficiently done by automation", it's versus "being unable to find a job."
Forget the sandwich clerk; schoolteachers are found somewhere along this trajectory.
I would answer almost all of the questions in your first paragraph "yes." I agree with all of your ideas in paragraph 2, so I think there is much we agree on, despite that.
I think it is in society's interest to arrange for there to be a number of job-vacancies of the Panera-kid-type available, even if that is not the sandwich-delivery mechanism of minimum cost. In principle, we could do better, but I am skeptical that it will happen.
>I think it is in society's interest to arrange for there to be a number of job-vacancies of the Panera-kid-type available
I completely disagree. It's actively making things worse to not use more efficient methods. Now if a restaurant wants to keep one of those people around for people who don't like the kiosks, or maybe to talk to if they have a question about something or want to ask for something the kiosk can't do, then that's great, because that's where people are actually useful: for handling things that automation can't, like special cases. Of course, you don't need as many humans this way, since there aren't that many people who the kiosk can't serve.
But having people employed just for the sake of employment is nothing more than make-work. It's just like the Soviet factories where they built wooden crates on one side of the factory, then moved them to the other side of the factory where another team disassembled them for recycling, then moved the wood to the other side of the factory where it was used for building crates, .... There's no dignity in make-work. If you're worried about there not being enough jobs, the answer is the UBI: give people a regular stipend and let them spend it however they want. At least some of them will find some new enterprise on their own, whether it's writing a book (like JK Rowling, who was on welfare when she wrote the books that made her a millionaire--she's worth almost $800M), or writing a phone game, or just doing odd jobs and not having to worry so much about having enough for rent because of the irregularity. The other answer is to get the government to invest in its people by providing education, and by financing important projects (like replacing those bridges). There's plenty of work to be done without resorting to make-work.
3. Even if there is a small, finite set of options that you can present on a screen, you should still be able to select them verbally.
4. If you want to ask a question, or ask for a suggestion, you should be able to do so free form.
5. If "Her" knows your preferences and allergies, she can just suggest the cluster of good ones.
6. Once you know what you want, you can just tell her "the usual"
7. In the "Her" interface, the teenager will never misspeak, any more than the screen will show you the wrong picture or misunderstand your touch.
8. If there is a screen or board present, the Her interface should be able to see it as well, and sort of work with you to make a selection. <- I know some indecisive people who would love this, and their loved ones would love this even more.
The Her interface like all fictional voice interfaces benefits from the actors reading from a script.
Try dictating a simple email sometime. The best voice recognition in the world won't solve the problem that it's very hard to do (also, that movie utterly left out important corrollaries like all the people everywhere he was would have been speaking in weird monosyllabic commands and leaking personal information in public). As I write this in a hotel foyer, I'm very glad for my predictive keyboard.
The Her interface looks good only because its in a scripted movie. Because its the Wish-fulfillment interface in the plot.
You're going to find it harder to read that novel while engaging in complex vocal communication. Both tasks compete for your phonological loop. Look up articulatory suppression.
I think it would be great for the eyes cause you are forced to exercise your depth perception rather than stare at a flat screen. Would even be better than an e-ink monitor[http://www.dasung.com/].
I wish those e-ink monitors didn't look so much like children's toys- I'd love to pick one up.
In 20 years, I think we'll look back at LCD/OLED monitors like how we currently look back at CRT/pre-CRT monitors, and wonder how on earth we stared at bright configurations of tiny lights for 10+ hours a day.
The OLPC's Pixel-Qi screen (listed in that Wikipedia article) was fantastic when in its black & white mode. It looked like e-ink and refreshed at 60Hz. Apparently the company died in 2015 though :(
> The OLPC's Pixel-Qi screen (listed in that Wikipedia article) was fantastic when in its black & white mode.
I'm sorry, but that's terribly inaccurate. I have a OLPC and the screen is poor. It is grainy and has a mesh like appearance to it in both color and transflective grayscale mode.
> It looked like e-ink and refreshed at 60Hz. Apparently the company died in 2015 though :(
The P-Qi screen refreshes fast, but it looks nothing like a kindle panel.
Creating fake sci fi interfaces for movies, a very cool concept. It's inspiring to know that whatever makes you happy there is potentially a job doing it.
I have an almost fetish for retro and retro sci-fi interfaces.
I stumbled into this really gorgeous, simplistic terminal like design. I was so inspired by it I decided to re-create the style in HTML+CSS. Once I did that I had another spark, and decided to make it a working faux terminal. And then I had the idea that maybe I could turn it into a small little game. You discover this machine, like you dialed into it randomly one day, and have to navigate yourself around, discover the story through reading logs, and hack into other machines to progress through the levels.
I'm an engineer through and through; it was odd to be so inspired by a design that I went off to make a game :P
More recently I've been obsessed with the Alien: Isolation interface, which is showcased on the OP (https://68.media.tumblr.com/ea49aeb0e1a6961a7dc1b3ed02ebca85...). It's given me yet another hankering to ... do something. Not sure what yet, but it's just such an inspiring design.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 94.0 ms ] threadI actually miss that style, good thing it still exists in movies. Oblivion had also very nice GUI's. But Gmunk has a lot of other great work!
http://www.gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-So-Interaction-Lessons-Science/d...
My personal favorite is probably still Oblivion http://www.gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX but if these are too over the top science fiction, The Bourne Identity's is pretty fun too http://coleran.com/gallery-category/fui/#the-bourne-identity
I find this odd because its easier on the eyes and looks better. I would honestly prefer "night mode" for pretty much all software (ms office, the whole internet, etc). Gmail black theme looks great but the actually emails are still white background / black font...
Im not really a hacker... Does anyone know good "night mode" software or settings? There is one in windows 10 but it only applies to settings windows and not the file browser or much anything else.
I used this app [2] to read hacker news and im delighted to find they have a web interface as well which has a dark mode
[1] userstyles.org [2] hn.premii.com
Dark themes really are just way easier on the eyes. Combining the Windows 10 dark theme, the black theme in Office 2016, Firefox Developer Edition, plus a bunch of dark themes for web sites yields a pretty good overall experience.
I think once you start setting OLED on the desktop, you'll begin to see more work being done in this area.
I am also a huge fan of dark backgrounds; under the right circumstances. It can make you really focus in on specific content if the interface is minimalistic in its approach.
Computing was a lot easier on the eyes back in the days of green text on black backgrounds.
It was borrowed by Pixar for The Incredibles.
Using back-projected screens meant 2001 had flat screens which still look modern today --as opposed to the bulbous CRT monitors used in Blade a Runner and Alien.
The second greatest, though, is quite visual: the interface in Minority Report.
I wish I could find the interviews with the UI engineers who talked about the influences that went into it.
What is the nature of the thought you want to transmit? How do you make sure that you are not transmitting idle day dreams? How can you be sufficiently precise for a computer?
Remember Firefox (Clint Eastwood movie) where you have to think in Russian to launch the weapons (spoiler!). Well, suppose you casually "thought" the word "shoot" or "fire" or whatever the Russian equivalent is?
Suppose your friend -- Maverick -- is goofing around with you and you're both in an inverted dive and you just think. "Oh that guy. Sometimes, I just want to launch at him."
The best way to interface is with language! You should have to say the command out loud or to type it out. That way you are being precise and deliberate.
Of course, it would be even better if you have a specialized language that was free of the ambiguity of human speech...
How to make sure you don't hit the wrong button?
What happens if the image recognition misinterprets your gesture?
What happens if the voice recognition can't understand context and misinterprets things as commands? (Hey, turns out the last one is a real problem people struggle with at the moment)
That's why the field of UI design exists at all - and I don't think neural interfaces would be any exception to that: They will require their own kind of UI design.
Of course today, we don't know much about the possible design primitives, but I could imagine it becoming interesting...
And I'm sure his manager loves to see exactly what he's doing from 100m away.
If you stuck that UI into a pair of VR-AR goggles, and replaced the huge gorilla-arm movements with barely-visible finger twitches, I might consider it.
It's sort of like having to swing a Wiimote to swing a sword in a game. Initial novelty value is great, but after a while, if you could do the same thing by simply pushing a button, why wouldn't you just push a button? No matter how good the motion tracking is, if it's not the most efficient way to accomplish the task, there's no point to it.
Aside from how cool it looks and the cinematic qualities that made it appropriate for the movie, everything he used that UI for could have been done much more efficiently with a mouse and keyboard-based UI.
No, that was the absolute worst UI in the history of films. Spoken words simply cannot carry remotely as much information as visually-seen images. Haven't you ever heard the saying "a picture is worth 1000 words"?
Let me give a modern-day example: at a typical Panera Bread restaurant right now, you can order a sandwich either by talking to some teenager at the counter, or by using the touchscreen kiosk. Panera lets you customize sandwiches heavily, by changing the bread, adding cheeses, changing/adding toppings, etc. So I walk into a Panera and would like to order a tuna sandwich but I want to see all the different options and make it completely customized. They have probably 20 different kinds of bread alone, not to mention all the other options. So which do you think is more efficient, having some teenager rattle off 20 kinds of bread, or looking at them on a screen? And how do I know what these breads are anyway? How long is it going to take for some teenager to tell me what all those things are, and maybe show me samples, compared to just looking at some photos on the screen? How about just verifying the order? With the teenager, how long will it take him to read off the entire order to me, and what is the possibility that the information will be received incorrectly because I can't hear him that well, he speaks with an accent or lisp, there's too much noise, or he just misspeaks or skips something? With a screen, I can see the order printed out exactly.
Even though it may be more efficient for the customer to have the touch screen, I don't think service automation is so black and white.
Risks? I also cited actual, real benefits. How do I order my sandwich with a different kind of bread with the teenager? I don't. It's not possible. The customers behind me will get very mad if I ask the teenager to list off all 20 different kinds of bread, and to show them all to me personally too. The teenager likely will not do as I ask here, plus it's a massive waste of my time too. Ordering from humans works OK when you have a very short and simple menu so there's little chance for confusion, but this means it's quite impossible to have a lot of selection.
How about this idea: let's get rid of computer monitors, and replace them with verbal-only interfaces. How well do you think it's going to work out if you want to order a pair of shoes on Amazon.com (or any online store) when you can't even see them, and just have something reading text into your ear? Or, because you're so concerned about employment, maybe we should ban computer users from reading monitors, and require them to hire people to read stuff from the screen to them!
Finally, would you mind if I came over and smashed your car windows? You shouldn't; you should be happy, because that means someone will have a job replacing those windows.
I don't, in fact, think it's wise to automate the people behind sandwich counters out of a job; it doesn't follow from that that I would prefer a pneumatic tube to my computer monitor.
I acknowledged that the benefits you cited were real, by using the word "real." I assure you I'm not some kind of paperclip-AI-zealot when it comes to employing people for tasks that could be automated.
I wonder if there is any level of peristent unemployment--25%, say? at which you would prefer to halt the growth of the kind of automation which is drying up the job pool? Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind sandwich counters? Enjoy the bread selection.
How is there any "dignity" in doing a job that's better and more conveniently (to the customer) done by automation, or by the customer themselves (pumping gas)? That's nothing more than make-work. If you want to put people to work, give them something to do that isn't so easily done by machine. I can come up with plenty of suggestions offhand: 1) like in the New Deal, we could employ people fixing up the National Park system. Building benches, improving hiking trails, building park buildings, etc., aren't things easily done by current machines. 2) America's infrastructure is in atrocious shape. Tons of bridges desperately need to be replaced. Lots of people could be employed in construction here. Bridges can't be built by robots yet (or any time soon since they're all one-off projects and vary so much, plus they're so huge). 3) There's supposedly a shortage of nurses. Send some people to nursing school. You only need a 2-year degree for the entry-level jobs. We don't have robots yet which can start an IV or do a sponge-bath. 4) We need more mass transit in this country. Put people to work building tunnels for subways and building subway stations.
>Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind sandwich counters? Enjoy the bread selection.
Or does it never matter whether there are jobs behind bank counters? Enjoy your cash from the ATM. If you use ATMs, or your bank's website, or your bank's phone app, then you're a hypocrite.
Guilty as charged. Before my bank had an ATM, I organized my time differently, but I survived.
As for dignity, it's not versus "a job that can be more efficiently done by automation", it's versus "being unable to find a job."
Forget the sandwich clerk; schoolteachers are found somewhere along this trajectory.
I would answer almost all of the questions in your first paragraph "yes." I agree with all of your ideas in paragraph 2, so I think there is much we agree on, despite that.
I think it is in society's interest to arrange for there to be a number of job-vacancies of the Panera-kid-type available, even if that is not the sandwich-delivery mechanism of minimum cost. In principle, we could do better, but I am skeptical that it will happen.
I completely disagree. It's actively making things worse to not use more efficient methods. Now if a restaurant wants to keep one of those people around for people who don't like the kiosks, or maybe to talk to if they have a question about something or want to ask for something the kiosk can't do, then that's great, because that's where people are actually useful: for handling things that automation can't, like special cases. Of course, you don't need as many humans this way, since there aren't that many people who the kiosk can't serve.
But having people employed just for the sake of employment is nothing more than make-work. It's just like the Soviet factories where they built wooden crates on one side of the factory, then moved them to the other side of the factory where another team disassembled them for recycling, then moved the wood to the other side of the factory where it was used for building crates, .... There's no dignity in make-work. If you're worried about there not being enough jobs, the answer is the UBI: give people a regular stipend and let them spend it however they want. At least some of them will find some new enterprise on their own, whether it's writing a book (like JK Rowling, who was on welfare when she wrote the books that made her a millionaire--she's worth almost $800M), or writing a phone game, or just doing odd jobs and not having to worry so much about having enough for rent because of the irregularity. The other answer is to get the government to invest in its people by providing education, and by financing important projects (like replacing those bridges). There's plenty of work to be done without resorting to make-work.
1. Your hands are free to read a novel
2. You don't have to carry a screen around
3. Even if there is a small, finite set of options that you can present on a screen, you should still be able to select them verbally.
4. If you want to ask a question, or ask for a suggestion, you should be able to do so free form.
5. If "Her" knows your preferences and allergies, she can just suggest the cluster of good ones.
6. Once you know what you want, you can just tell her "the usual"
7. In the "Her" interface, the teenager will never misspeak, any more than the screen will show you the wrong picture or misunderstand your touch.
8. If there is a screen or board present, the Her interface should be able to see it as well, and sort of work with you to make a selection. <- I know some indecisive people who would love this, and their loved ones would love this even more.
Try dictating a simple email sometime. The best voice recognition in the world won't solve the problem that it's very hard to do (also, that movie utterly left out important corrollaries like all the people everywhere he was would have been speaking in weird monosyllabic commands and leaking personal information in public). As I write this in a hotel foyer, I'm very glad for my predictive keyboard.
The Her interface looks good only because its in a scripted movie. Because its the Wish-fulfillment interface in the plot.
You're going to find it harder to read that novel while engaging in complex vocal communication. Both tasks compete for your phonological loop. Look up articulatory suppression.
https://youtu.be/nHmLhRx7Oyw?t=1m50s
I think it would be great for the eyes cause you are forced to exercise your depth perception rather than stare at a flat screen. Would even be better than an e-ink monitor[http://www.dasung.com/].
In 20 years, I think we'll look back at LCD/OLED monitors like how we currently look back at CRT/pre-CRT monitors, and wonder how on earth we stared at bright configurations of tiny lights for 10+ hours a day.
Transflexive LCDs are, in my opinion, the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d.... I can't wait until phones/watches/laptops start using these. My eyes will be very happy when that day comes.
I'm sorry, but that's terribly inaccurate. I have a OLPC and the screen is poor. It is grainy and has a mesh like appearance to it in both color and transflective grayscale mode.
> It looked like e-ink and refreshed at 60Hz. Apparently the company died in 2015 though :(
The P-Qi screen refreshes fast, but it looks nothing like a kindle panel.
I stumbled into this really gorgeous, simplistic terminal like design. I was so inspired by it I decided to re-create the style in HTML+CSS. Once I did that I had another spark, and decided to make it a working faux terminal. And then I had the idea that maybe I could turn it into a small little game. You discover this machine, like you dialed into it randomly one day, and have to navigate yourself around, discover the story through reading logs, and hack into other machines to progress through the levels.
It looked like this: http://imgur.com/a/pBOtP
I'm an engineer through and through; it was odd to be so inspired by a design that I went off to make a game :P
More recently I've been obsessed with the Alien: Isolation interface, which is showcased on the OP (https://68.media.tumblr.com/ea49aeb0e1a6961a7dc1b3ed02ebca85...). It's given me yet another hankering to ... do something. Not sure what yet, but it's just such an inspiring design.
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/303940/CAPSULE/
I love the fonts used on Sci-Fi movies, like the ones showed in those GUIs, but it is pretty difficult to find such fonts.