Future Screens Are Mostly Blue
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
"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.
Starfleet Tech Support.
In other words: it shows that, if people react to a UI like they do in the show, that's the perfect UI.
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.
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.
Or everything has the wrong aspect ratio.
For example, I don't run my browser maximized, because I don't want web pages in landscape; acres of margin or very long lines - neither choice is good. The viewport of my browser is nearly square (1500 x 1300).
Terminals don't work great with very long lines either; man, less etc. adjust to terminal width making lines harder to read.
My scratchpad app I keep for notes is generally notepad shaped, i.e. taller than it is wide, but not as wide as a terminal window.
My password manager (KeePass2) is the only other really common app. I don't interact with it very often other than via hotkey.
I keep Emacs/IDE maximized on a different screen.
But sometimes an overlapping window is very useful. For example, I'm watching a fullscreen video, but I want to chat with a friend in an instant messaging app. I can put the conversation window on top of the video in a corner of the screen where it doesn't block anything important.
Or I'm doing some kind of graphical work, image editing, web design, etc, and I only need to see part of a window, but it needs to fill the height of the screen. I can put other programs on top of the parts I don't need to see.
Tiling is great, but overlapping windows have their place too.
The way i understand LCARS is that you would have a primary activity up front, and then a menu of other activities down the side.
When your soul interaction with a normally large window is just a tiny strip on the bottom, it's like you've divided a single display in to something normally thin and wide (a console for example), and another thing on top that is slightly smaller but otherwise that you want to interact with.
The nice part about this layout over a purely tiling window one is that the console is entirely ready for you to switch to it being the full screen when you want to read the backlog or do more complex work with it.
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.)
But considering Space: 1999 came out literally 20 years earlier, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
There was no teleportation - but there were ships flying a regular run to and from a moon base.
UFO is unbelievably good considering it was made in 1970. It's of its time socially, ahead of its time visually, and a lot of the scripts still stand up as excellent imaginative TV writing.
I'm sure they showed the moon shuttle a few times, and of course they did lots of effects for the fighter jets and submarines blowing UFOs up, but it wasn't ubiquitous like in Space: 1999.
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.
It was nothing to do with the MicroTAC being £3,000? No, it was the direction of the flip. Right.
The later MicroTACs with LCD sold loads. At the time, most people seemed to prefer them to the early StarTAC.
Not to mention adjusting for inflation the MicroTAC was 4 times the price of the StarTAC, not just 3.
Clearly the shell direction is the one thing which made the StarTAC. Not SMS support, not being 25% the price and 25% the weight (assuming a slim-battery MicroTAC), not the vibrate mode, it was the flip opening up instead of down.
Of course, touchscreen phones make great computing devices, which makes their inadequacy as phones irrelevant.
Sure I could combine them in an iPhone, but I don't think they need to be tied together.
But apparently they have now announced that they are end of life.
The idea of carrying a single object that is your means of communication / music player / camera / train ticket / monetary instrument / entertainment center is neat, until you think about your battery dying / losing it / dropping it and having it crack in half when you're a hundred miles from home.
I guess it is less bad if you tend to travel in packs, and would always have a backup in that way.
I seem to have passed peak-smartphone, I check it much less often, and phone more. I've been tempted a few times by the flip-smartphones that exist in the Far East - I wish they were available here so I could trial one in a store. Don't want to buy until I decide if they're best of both worlds, or worst...
Not exactly the same, but I've noticed that if I type with my eyes closed, I'm both faster and make fewer errors than when I look at the screen. I guess its because I can just let my muscle memory do its thing without distraction.
It's really annoying to be forced in the direction of fake technological "progress" that's mostly a result of extensive marketing. There is no fundamental reason why a smart phone can't have proper keys for calling.
There are couple of Android flip phones on the market, but since Android UI is designed 100% for touchscreens, I am pretty sure the experience of using them will be horrible.
[1] http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/9018-large/Samsung...
They have some decent hardware in there; shame it's so difficult to make it do anything interesting!
Smart phones compensate for lower call quality and reception with their processors and apps, there is always going to be a tradeoff, to most it is worth it but if your business relies on a lot of phone calls and being able to take those calls wherever you are then having something like the StarTac is great.
But, to be honest, I quite miss my Nokia 3210 which had fantastic battery life, never dropped calls, got reception in places my iPhone never does, and never, ever spent ages trying to send an iMessage instead of an SMS when there's a really bad 3G or 2.5G signal (which frustrates me almost to the point of violence).
It'd be awesome if my sim card ( or something the size of the old simcards ) had as much storage as it could manage. With today's microSD densities, you can realistically hold everything and more than what's on your phone (though the storage medium itself is less resilient..).
Then you go to work, pop it in your hardcore resilient phone. Go home, pop it in your tablet. This however empowers users almost exclusively, there isn't much advantage to a consortium of companies implementing this.
When calling on my iPhone the call quality is significantly higher in many cases. I'm not sure if it requires both callers to be on an iPhone or on the same carrier or what. But sometimes the calls are as good as the audio coming from the Music app. Other times, they sound like StarTAC calls. But something has definitely changed in the last few years for certain types of calls. (And I've found FaceTime audio calls are always high quality audio.)
That said, if it is iPhone to iPhone, it may well be that the call never touch the carrier systems and instead happens over iMessage for all i know.
That would only happen if you are using Facetime Audio
Of course the Blue Planet isn't blue if you remove all that makes it blue...
The sea is a notoriously hostile environment for great apes such as us.
The sky is notoriously unattainable (we fly since, what, 2 centuries?)
Everywhere else, Blue is pretty uncommon On average, the wilderness is mostly shades of brown and green. And what is blue tend to be pretty intense: flowers and venomous animals, mostly.
That said, I've read around here that colours are mostly a cultural thing (except maybe red). So I'd wouldn't put too much into it. The interesting parts come later in the article anyway: how UI design could take inspiration from sci-fi, including its mistakes.
For the scenario of a neon sign at night, you're probably in the mesopic vision [3] range, which is a somewhat fuzzy mix of the two. If they're all putting out an even number of photons, the blue sign would still not be as visible.
An interesting real-world experience I had with this: I was driving at night and saw the indicator LED on my phone flashing blue out of the corner of my eye. When I stopped and checked it, it turned out that it was actually yellow. Even when something's bright enough to trigger a color response in the center of your vision, it may be a primarily cone response toward the outside of your vision, which is strongly dominated by rod cells [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photopic_vision
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_vision
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopic_vision
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell#/media/File...
I quite often have a similar experience...
I always put my phone on my desk just below my monitor - just at the edge of my field-of-view. My phone has an LED that flashes green when I have an SMS and red when I have a missed call or low battery (both with the same cadence). If I'm focussed on the monitor, I can see the light flashing but until I look at it, it appears to be flashing white (presumably because I have very few cones at the edge of my field-of-view).
Even more interestingly, once I have looked at it, determined whether it's red or green, and then return my eyes to looking at the monitor, I can still see it flashing at the edge of my field-of-view, but now my brain fills in which color it is - I now see it flashing red or green (despite there still being no cones to detect this).
I think it's amazing how of my perception of the world is actually filled in by my brain rather than "raw data".
As a side effect of a meditation technique I use, I several times daily look for one each of objects in my environment that are red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Blue takes a long time to find and purple takes longer. If sci-fi screens are blue bc of rarity, wouldn't purple be a choice, too?
I think blue and purple are strange and rare. But purple probably has too many connotations with little kids' arts and crafts or quirky old people.
And we don't have to limit ourselves to what is natural, we can consider things in the man-made environment. We tend to make many more things blue than we do purple.
Looking around my desk:
Blue things: static mat, phone LED, supply label, USB cable, sticky notes, Outlook, mouse pad, pen, bananajack, map, medicine bottle cap.
Purple things: coffee mill box, cover of notebook.
In the human retina, the responses from the 3 types of cone cells (daylight light detectors) are immediately combined into a lightness signal (M + L), and two color signals, “red–green” (L – M) and “yellow–blue” (L + M – S), where {L, M, S} are the long-wavelength-, medium-wavelength-, and short-wavelength-sensitive cone cells, respectively. The basic L/M/S signals never make it past this first level of processing in the eye; all the brain sees are the combined signals.
The perceptual geometry of human color vision therefore has a built-in notion of red, yellow, green, and blue as “unique hues”. There’s a fair amount of variance from person to person, but anyone with trichromatic vision will be able to pick out some particular hue of “blue with no green or red in it”, “green with no blue or yellow in it”, etc.
You’re right that some languages apparently didn’t have any particular need to distinguish blue from green. I could believe that the introduction of blue dyes made this distinction useful. There’s been a lot of study of the topic of color naming, but I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer on that point.
For most cultures on Earth, the last color they named was blue --- this is thought to be due to its rarity in nature.
Up through the Renaissance, the pigment for blue paint was made from Lapis Lazuli which made blue a very expensive paint and rare in most art. This is another sign of the rarity of blue in nature as pigments for other colors were much easier to come by.
I haven't listened to this episode of Radiolab in a while, but I think it provides more info/source on both of these points: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/
There is also an interesting anecdote where one of the interviewees tells the story about teaching his daughter colors. He and his wife made the decision not to tell her what color the sky was; he would go on walks with his daughter and ask her to identify the colors of various plants and objects, when asked about the sky for a while she didn't have an answer and when she finally did she said its as "white" not "blue" --- which does seem like a better way to describe the sky since even on a clear day the brightest parts can look almost white; but someone told me once it was blue.
(Source of the famous 'wine-dark sea')
And for the sky and water that we'd now call blue, there was no need to differentiate between blue and green. You might want to tell someone "Don't pick the green fruit, only the ones that have turned red," so having a single word for green and red would be a problem. But the sky is always going to be either blue, gray, or red, so a single greenblue word doesn't constrain your communication about it.
I can think of a couple exceptions, like blueberries (where you can refer to their darkness instead of hue for ripeness) and green tinted skies in severe storms, but it definitely makes sense that the word for blue would be invented last.
That said, it's still one of the three basic colors humans can see. There was clearly an evolutionary advantage to seeing it. And I find it hard to believe that radiolab episode that said people literally didn't see blue, not just use a different word.
The hosts did keep talking about "not being able to see blue", but I believe what the guest was getting at is that without the word for blue you see it but do not perceive it (or at least as strongly as the perception of other colors).
I wonder if this is related to the color/language study talked about in this episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/ (the part discussing a rat study with Charles Fernyhough).
[1] http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2014/why-the-blue-led-shou...
Are the authors assuming that people never looked up?
I think the reason blue looks so fascinating to us is precisely because the sky is blue. What is that blue thing over our heads, I wonder (says ancient man), it's a very interesting thing, whatever it is.
If it's green, you have a reason to say it's green. If it's black, you have a reason to say it's black. If it's blue... who cares? It's almost always blue, and it never indicates anything that you need to be concerned about. Kind of like an ancient, completely homogeneous society doesn't need a word to indicate the color of their skin. It's just skin colored. Until they meet another tribe with a different color of skin.
There are plenty of things we still don't have words for the color of. Steel comes to mind. We literally just call the color "steel" because steel is always the color of steel. It's not quite grey, it's not quite silver. And silver is colored silver without a distinct word for it. Because the only way we need to talk about the color of steel or silver or gold is when they're not colored like steel or silver or gold. Blued steel, rose gold, white gold, etc. But if it's colored gold, it's just gold. And if they sky is blue, it's just the sky.
Ancient man spent a lot of time outdoors. I'd like to think that they were intensely interested in the color and appearance of the sky.
There's also this rhyme[1]:
Red sky at night, sailors' delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning;
It's almost always blue
Unfortunately not true in the Portland Oregon metro area.
The only reason you need to mention the color of the sky is when it's not sky-colored. Unless the sky is red or grey or black or green, you could just call it "sky".
Yes, that's probably the simplest and best explanation.
A notable exception is the Matrix which opted for a green caste specifically to highlight scenes that are in the Matrix itself.
Some of the best color grading I've seen in the past few years has actually been on Game of Thrones, where good color grading is used to cement the aesthetic of the show's many different locales - it's to the point now where in this season's premiere, I could tell the instant an establishing shot came on screen where the scene was taking place: "Look at those vivid greens and turquoises; we're in Dorne!" or "Misty blues and tans, must be Braavos!"
But regarding blue screens: the less blue and the more yellow (or other warm colors), the better.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191580-blue-led-inventors...
I'm sorry, but whoever wrote this knows absolutely nothing about design. Or worse, is the type of visual designer who treats usability like an afterthought and thinks aligning with whatever is fashionable is an indicator of quality.
None of the design decisions made in those examples reflect the needs of someone using a machine. It reflects the needs of a TV-series of movie to have cheap props that fit their narrative of exposition and drama, as well as the budget restrictions.
If you want to pick out "80's future" electronica, then the Airwolf theme or Crockett's theme (Miami Vice) would be more natural choices in my opinion... Or if sticking to Jarre, tracks like Moon Machine or Computer Weekend, which sounded cheesy at the time too. And for those who likes their 80's cheesy, purply-neon, metallic, there's also the Outrun subreddit [1] which tries hard to take it places where even the 80's wouldn't go - turns out there's several electronica sub-genres dedicated to it as well.
If you haven't yet, you should check out the two opening tracks to Electronica 2. They are basically an exploration of Jarre's early symphonic style with lots of references to Oxygene (though not Oxygene II) and Rendez-Vous to the point where I keep being "cued" by it to expect well known sequences from those albums that never comes (normally this would detract from it, but it works well).
I'm hoping the new series coming out in a year tries to recreate what the future COULD be by jumping a century ahead of where voyager left off (i believe that was as far as we got into the future in a Star Trek series).
The game Terminus took that approach. The game had a bunch of settings that let you get "arcade-like" physics and appearance of space, but the manual explained that this was provided by the ships on-board computer systems to make it more intuitive for people to fly them.
You could opt to "turn off" all the enhancements, such as moving starfields, bright nebulas serving effectively as markers to help orient yourself, "outside sound" etc., up to and including "computer assisted" firing of navigational rockets (so that rotating the ship would start changing direction by automatically firing rockets vs. being able to rotate the ship while continuing in the original direction)
Modern TV remotes have also long drifted in that direction with the four color buttons that change use depending on what screen you are on.
I will probably never love a software UI as much as I loved Android 3.0-4.1.
Good Sci-Fi movies are smart and interesting, they appeal to the mind. Thus they use a cold, cerebral color. If they were about emotions, like a Rom-Com, they would use a warm, comforting color.
This is a great related essay: "HAL, Mother, and Father: Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien." http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-and...
[1]https://hansbkahl.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/2001_a_space_o... [2]https://hansbkahl.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/968full-2001-a... [3]https://hansbkahl.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/on_space_stati... [4]https://drnorth.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/vlcsnap-11937.jp...
This is strange. First the ocean and the sky look blue. So regardless of whether they are, they are.
Second, there are blue flowers, blue birds, blue fish, blue eyes, blueberries, Kentucky Bluegrass, Blue Heelers, and Blue Tick Hounds. It doesn't seem more rare to me than red or yellow. Green is everywhere. But blue doesn't seem rare to me.
It is the second most common color in flags (behind red) for a reason.
it is the second most common color in logos for a reason.
I really thought the blue-histograms over the years was super cool.
What happened in 1991 where it suddenly became RED? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/
Terminator 2: Judgement Day - the interface from Arnold's point of view was a RED overlay.
Which, one might consider an invalid sample as it was not meant to represent a human-computer-interface but in fact, an Android interface.
Anyways, great article!
Or the fact that old terminals were green (thus not futuristic) and red is damn hard to read.
Also: I love how Terminator 2 made 1991 red.
What I was trying to say is that it makes sense to first set up a self-contained transaction, and then a single universal "button" to push it into the world, instead of firing off single commands, one at a time. (Especially at the latencies involved in cross-galaxy communication)
GNU make, just to drive the purists nuts.