Hacker News Reader

> Is this because such visualizations are useless clutter or because film makers have better tools for creating them than actual programmers do?

Experience suggests mainly the former, a little of the latter. In a film visualisations could be said to fall into "scenery/looks cool/thematic" (which normally corresponds to useless) and "drives the story". For a vis to drive the story it needs a single interpretation - and animation helps with that.

Real world vis rarely has a single interpretation, so attempting to animate like they do in a film would often make the vis less useful (as it would 'hide' valid interpretations, and most vis exists to help explore).

That said, some vis does exist to tell a story (often deliberately hiding the inconvenient truths rather than highlighting useful ones) and benefits from film like tools. These tools do exist, but are (rightfully) focused on creative media rather than programmers. The overlap exists, but is small.

- Most of them over-use transparency to absurd degrees. https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/florida-hospital-ui

It's probably more apologetics than anything else, but as an EE my first thought is that the pixels are some kind of OLED that is transparent by default, so every pixel that is not lit up saves power. Lighting up a full background on that handheld in the second pic would literally take thousands of times more power (obviously only taking into account the screen, not CPU, etc.).

I think darkmode provides a variety of practical advantages in the VFX context.

* It would seem to be easier to transition a dark mode UI between solid and translucent/transparent/hologram elements. I think the moment you have transparent/holography elements, you're almost immediately sucked into a dark-mode type UI.

* Dark-mode displays are just going to be... darker on average. I imagine it would simplify lighting in a lot of scenarios. Probably also gives you more flexibility when framing/creating reflection shots

* I feel like in film, big expanses of white / light grey carry much stronger connotations than big expanses of black / dark grey. Large expanses of black can be interpreted as absence, and somewhat natural. We are familiar with deep pits of shadow. We are familiar with the night sky. While big expanses of white / light grey is interpreted as sterile or unnatural, or at least "unusual". Think of the first training scenario in the Matrix (the white expanse with tv and two chairs). Think of God's office in Bruce Almighty.

> I feel like in film, big expanses of white / light grey carry much stronger connotations than big expanses of black / dark grey.

This might be a carryover from the days when fully lighting up a movie theater screen would reveal all the imperfections and stains in the canvas, and film makers learned to avoid that.

> Is this because such visualizations are useless clutter or because film makers have better tools for creating them than actual programmers do?

Another reason is that real visualisations are hard. You have to faithfully represent some actual data, and make it ‘usable’ in the sense of well designed keys/labelling etc, and choose a chart type that is appropriate for the data and the point you are making, plus you somehow have to make it pretty and not overwhelming. These constraints all fight each other, you go round and round in circles and eventually you have something passable. It’s a professional field at the intersection of data science and design, it’s not like there is some magic ‘tooling’ that solves it for you.

Fake visualisations are very easy to make pretty - you can just generate data that looks nice, the design doesn’t have to have any real utility or even make sense, etc. It just has to look like a data visualisation.

> … assumption that 'futuristic' stuff is way more info-packed than today's UIs are - where does that come from?

Text adds texture, and it tell also tells the audience that our hyper-aware and very clever protagonist is seeking and scanning the text for some sort of data that us normie-non-future people wouldn’t understand.

At the end of the day, it’s just a creative trope that consistently pleases the audience. It looks cool.

As for the source, you could go all the way back to Terminator or TRON, and as recent(ish) as The Matrix, but I think Ghost in the Shell has been most influential.

> - Film "FUIs" are almost invariably dark these days. I wonder to what extent the designers are influenced by the dark modes in the tools they use.

The overall color tone of the recent movies using FUIs seems also pretty dark