Simon Willison’s Weblog

This is awesome. I've often wondered who makes this stuff - there's sometimes some pretty smart interface stuff used in films, particularly Sci-Fi. I'd admit to having freeze-framed films in the past just to have a look, but that would sound a little too geeky.

On the flip side, some of it is really stupid, particularly on TV shows. Like in CSI where they are 'searching the fingerprint database', and it'll sequentially search through every person flashing up their faces one by one until a match is found. Or when a character is 'checking through the hard drive' and windows just magically open every few seconds without any user input. Artistic license only goes so far!

Tim Fountain - 3rd December 2009 17:11 - #

I don't think I've ever seen a fingerprint search dramatized *without* the very device Tim describes. Sometimes for variety, you get images of fingerprints flashing up instead of mugshots. It's become an established cinematic trope, along with crashed cars that spontaneously explode, silenced firearms that emit only the quietest of whispers, locked doors that can be opened by shooting them etc.

Another couple of computer interface favourites are the big flashing red "ACCESS DENIED" graphics whenever anyone types an incorrect password, and of course drastic graphical corruption/meltdown to denote a virus attacking a system.

There's some great stuff in 70's/early-80's sci-fi too - usually green screen 40-column commandlines with astonishing natural language processing. See Alien, The Thing, WarGames etc.

dmc - 3rd December 2009 18:50 - #

Calling all cars, calnlig all cars, we're ready to make a deal.

Trinity - 16th August 2011 13:09 - #

Gee whiz, and I thghout this would be hard to find out.

Diandra - 8th October 2011 21:52 - #

Thanks for wriitng such an easy-to-understand article on this topic.

Minnie - 10th October 2011 05:06 - #