How sci-fi influences today's gadgets

November 26, 2007

Originally hosted at http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/11/how-sci-fi-influences-todays-gadgets.html

Check out this designer's site - Mark Coleran has made it his job to design user interfaces for technology in sci-fi movies. He has been responsible for interfaces from the Predator's helmet to gadgets for Lara Croft and James Bond. His showreel is available here.

I found Mark's site via this blog post, which also links to a couple of other good related sites I had seen before: a fun research paper analysing movie interfaces and a list of 10 usability bloopers from movies.

Movie interfaces can definitely influence public perception of real-world ideas for new ways to interact. Just look at how the phrase "Minority Report" has become a shorthand for "amazing gestural interface". It crops up everywhere, and was crucial to the viral spike in attention that Jeff Han's two-handed interface got after his TED talk appeared online. We do it here at New Scientist too.

Yet when I spoke with Shahram Izadi when writing about Microsoft's seeing screen (with video), he seemed tired of its use. "Multi-touch interfaces have been around since the early 80s", he told me, "and that doesn't mean they haven't delivered – they are still younger than the mouse was when it really took off."

That certainly put it in perspective for me. It seems to take a long time for new interfaces to become established and actually have an impact.

UK historian of science David Edgerton thinks that is true of all technology. He argues that throughout history it is 'old' technologies that are crucial to events at any point in time, not the 'over-hyped' newest ones.

For more analysis of Hollywood's track record on science/technology check out our earlier post on an academic analysis of 'movie physics'.

Tom Simonite, online technology reporter

Image: Mark Coleran