Maybe there is some true limitation inherent in this style UI which causes them to stay as mere experiments / novelty?
I'm thinking about demos like this which I've seen go by HN over the years (I'm not involved in any of these):
LCARS demo: https://www.mewho.com/ritos/
Tron-like terminal: https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui
Sci-fi UI components: https://github.com/arwes/arwes
And I've long been a fan of designers like gmunk doing UI work for film: https://gmunk.com/Oblivion-GFX
But I'm genuinely confused why the actual UIs we all use on a daily basis are all so derivative of one another when the space of UI possibilities is so vast.
theamk•1mo ago
(1) Human eyes are drawn to moving objects, so unimportant things should not move. That rotating globe with points, or blinking "everything is OK", or jumping arrows would get very old very fast.
(2) Interface should feel fast - not like this LCARS thing where each click takes a few seconds of highly annoying flashing before anything changes. Sure, it makes sense in the movie so that viewers know what the character did, but in real life people know where they clicked.
(3) (Professional) interfaces should be informative. If one needs to click ten times to browse the list of twenty people, and each click takes multiple seconds, that's a lot of wasted time. That said, if something is designed for novice/occasional users, lower information density is OK and in fact, that's what we see in all many modern mobile apps.
krschacht•1mo ago
However, I still think there's something to be said for movies attempting to build UIs that have a strong aesthetic and elicit an emotional response, whereas production apps feel so flat and boring, in comparison.
I still wonder why we aren't seeing people try to push the envelope stylistically to "wow" users.