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> Is there a good reason why the UI we see in sci-fi don't make it into actual products?

Most of the UIs I see in science fiction are intended to look good on the screen, not so much for actual real-world usability.

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My assumption is a bit different: the UIs in science fiction are intended to communicate information, now typically that's to advance the storyline but there's a lot of overlap with real apps. Maybe more importantly, UIs in movies are elicit a feeling. Maybe it's a shallow feeling of "this is cool!" but to me that's where it seems like production apps mostly give up. "It works, let's move on..." seems to be the bar in most cases rather than "let's wow users!"

This might be a clearer articulation of what I'm trying to get at with my question...

> rather than "let's wow users!"

Over the years, I've seen a lot of attempts to make UIs "wow users", and each time the result has been very problematic. Movie UIs are meant, as you say, to communicate things that movies needs communicated. Those things are unrelated to what people using software for real need communicated.

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