UI Screen Graphics: The Martian [video]

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.

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.

1. http://i.imgur.com/jwhxhkU.jpg

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.

Here's an interview with Territory about the movie.

https://medium.com/@HcSwahn_86152/ui-stories-the-martian-eff...

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.

This studio also did the graphics for Mission Impossible which had a similar style:

http://www.territorystudio.com/work/motion/?p=MissionImpossi...

Nice work!

They mentioned a lot of the graphics were interactive on-set. Any idea what web technology are they outputting this to? Flash?

The reality is always more mundane.

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...

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.

[0] http://videohive.net/item/quantum-hud-infographic/8678174?re...

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.

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.

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.

Anyone know what the font used in these screens was?

I googled but couldn't find it.

There are some amusing bits... At 1:38 it suggests Saturn orbits at a radius of 25 light-years from the sun. ("50 L.Y." in the upper left.)

Semi-related question: why is all the consumer tech in a movie set in the 2030s circa 2015?

1:03 -- "encripted information"

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.