

The Future is Movie OS - danhon
http://danhon.com/2010/04/16/the-future-is-movie-os/
We make fun of fictional Movie OS because it's "not realistic" (it's not), but haven't recognised that it fixes a problem we've not been dealing with adequately: creating intuitive software user experiences where actions result in transparently understood actions.<p>I argue that the requirements of Movie OS (that they must clearly convey critical plot information) produce clear lessons that we can learn from when we design user experiences. A dialog box with good copy and "Are you sure?" isn't good enough anymore.
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patrickk
You may be onto something here.

I remember reading somewhere that Bond gadgets become true after something
like 30 years, however I suspect that this pace of development will be speed
up dramatically as time goes on. Some examples off the top of my head: GPS -
there's an old Bond movie with a analog 'homing device', weapons on cars, cars
that can drive on the road and fly also, 'stealth technology' like in Die
Another Day (in development).

Getting back to movie inspired OSs, the guy who designed the amazing gesture
interface behind those in 'Minority Report' started a company and has
prototype UI in development:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ>

[http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority-
repor...](http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority-report-
computer-interface-makes-a-real-life-debut-20100217/)

~~~
rbanffy
The gesturing interface in MR does not solve the gorilla-arm syndrome problem.
Gesture interfaces should be based on slight hand and face movement, maybe
with voice cues.

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lkijuhyghjm
Obligatory Hitchhikers quote:

"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning
dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made
touch-sensitive — you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now
all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the
components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but
meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening
to the same programme."

~~~
patrickk
Life imitating art and vice versa.

Sci-Fi has a great influence in developing new technology, as it's a great
source of ideas. Take the moon landing as an example.

To follow on from the quote you gave above, the next stage is thought-control
of machines. It's got it's own difficulties too though - it's very difficult
to clear your mind to the degree necessary to control things:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyrd0uOuyms>

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rbanffy
> Life imitating art and vice versa.

Am I the only one that finds it tremendously amusing when life imitates
comedy?

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andrewvc
I think to a certain extent we already had Movie OS in the early 00s / late
90s when all kinds of apps were skinned. People would make all kinds of
baroque skins that looked like they came out of movies, that acted much like
this, but you know what? They were cluttered and hard to use.

Who remembers Winamp 3, with its fancy skins[1]. I know I breathed a sigh of
relief when iTunes with its simple, yet highly functional, interface came out.

1\. As an example: <http://www.thg.ru/technews/images/winamp_skin-270206.jpg>

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danhon
This misses the point. Skinning - in the Winamp model of 'same functionality
but different look' - is not the same as effective visual storytelling and
usage of animation.

I'm not talking about just how Movie OS looks, but how it behaves as a whole.
I agree that sticking a Star Trek skin on Windows 98 reduces usability.

~~~
andrewvc
Well, then why do all the examples in the article look like those horrible
skinned apps?

I have a feeling that what the author proposes leads us down the road of
pretty but ridiculous interfaces.

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TomasSedovic
Unfortunatelly, Movie OS is horrible security-wise.

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Legion
I searched the BugTraq archives and found not one single entry for MovieOS
vulnerabilities. Where's the disclosure??

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Semiapies
The two biggest problems I know of:

The available user password space is so small that random jabbing at the
keyboard will get you root access in under a minute.

The MovieOS developers refuse to remove the UPLOAD VIRUS "functionality" that
routes malware past any and all defenses.

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TomasSedovic
Yep. Also the fact that you can "bruteforce" most password-protected door
locks one character at a time.

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nzmsv
Interestingly enough, the "It's a UNIX operating system" moment from Jurassic
Park used real software. It's called fsn: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn>

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OSTwister
You know, having taking a look at FSN's home page I really don't think I would
want file sizes represented in either of the ways it does.

I've been using Eagle Mode for about a week - a zoomable UI - and while it's
ugly I really can't praise the file manager highly enough. It is a fantastic
improvement over the best conventional file managers, but representing file
size visually would ruin it. <http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/>

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barrkel
I just installed Eagle Mode - very interesting indeed. The fact that you can
put instructions, documentation etc. right there in situ with the relevant
controls is quite interesting.

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goodness
There was an article at UIST (a user interface conference) making similar
points about 15 years ago. Here's one free version of the paper:
<http://research.sun.com/techrep/1995/abstract-33.html> That paper had some
actual concrete recommendations for different kinds of animations that were
implemented in Self.

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danhon
Fantastic - thanks!

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epochwolf
And people will still ignore the flashing lights because they want to click
the dancing bunny.

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jimbokun
Maybe it will become an arms race of escalating cuteness. The OS designer
needs something cuter to draw your attention away from the dancing bunny,
which leads the dancing bunny malware author to come up with something even
cuter than that, etc.

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BoppreH
In less than a year your computer will be leaking glitter.

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rntz
I have to say, I hope the future looks a lot less like Movie OS and a lot more
like the Anti-Mac: <http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html>

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theBobMcCormick
I thought this was a great quote from the Anti-Mac article:

"The desktop metaphor assumes we save training time by taking advantage of the
time that users have already invested in learning to operate the traditional
office with its paper documents and filing cabinets. But the next generation
of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is
counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of
obsolete technologies."

It reminds me of a recent (non-computer related) incident in my own life. My
son's preschool teachers recently had the students in my son's class do an art
project where they made phones out of two pieces of construction paper and a
piece of yarn. The two pieces of construction paper were cut to look like a
old Bell telephone handset and base. I'm sure some of you can see where this
is going... the amusing, to me at least, result was that all of the children
followed directions and built their project, but couldn't identify what it
was. Most of them had never seen telephones with a cord and couldn't figure
out how an object too big to fit in your pocket was supposed to be a phone.
:-)

I _think_ this illustrates a long term problem with computer interfaces that
mimic real world objects and/or interactions, even in the simple case of icons
that resemble real-world objects. The real world changes. We haven't had to
deal with that much yet, because visual computer user interfaces have only
been prevalent so recently. But as time wears on, I think this is only going
to get more awkward.

As an example related to my story above, both the iPhone UI and the Android UI
use an icon that looks like an old Bell telephone handset to represent the
dialer. That image still makes sense to _my_ generation, but IMHO to my kids
it's just gonna look like a wierd abstract symbol. Similarly, many
applications use an icon that looks like a Rolodex to represent the
"phonebook" application. Heck, I think I've got co-workers who've never seen a
Rolodex!.

~~~
Raphael
Just as floppy has become the icon for Save buttons. You and I have used
floppies, so it makes a fair amount of sense, but many people will never see a
real one.

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theBobMcCormick
Great example!

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cookiecaper
I guess the thing may be that movies have the luxury of make-believe; that is,
they have absolute freedom with these interfaces because as someone else
pointed out, they don't actually have to function. Sure, their dialogs and
warning messages are great to convey a single important message, but what
about someone who needs to do something on the computer that reports the
"lockdown" status of an area? And do you really want it displayed with a huge
green bar every time you get into something that was previously protected?
Aren't there some situations where discretion is preferable?

In the milder example of the email flying off the screen, who wants to sit
around and wait for a few seconds watching these animations in everyday use?
Sure, they're a neat one-off or demo, but when you have a stack of emails to
pop off, nobody wants to sit around and wait for that cute little animation to
finish. You can probably toggle it, but after the first few times, who would
leave it on? It seems like something that would just make grandma's computer
usage even slower.

I do think that we could probably look at movies more and try to cherry-pick
some cool ideas for dialogs or animations, but in general movie widgets, like
everything else in the movies, are larger-than-life. They wouldn't work if you
tried to deploy them as a real usable UI.

~~~
danhon
"And do you really want it displayed with a huge green bar every time you get
into something that was previously protected? Aren't there some situations
where discretion is preferable?"

Well - we won't know without trying. But it's clear that in the Read/Write Web
Facebook case, a bunch of people had _thought_ that they had logged in to
Facebook when in fact they hadn't. And that they didn't even know where they
were.

You may not want it every time. But at the moment, we don't even have it at
all. That's restrictive in the kind of messages we can send out.

For emails flying off the screen: the execution is in the detail. A few
seconds may be too long. For some people, it may not even be long enough. But
the animation isn't necessarily just showing that an email is being sent: it
can convey a lot of other information in a clear, yet subtle way. It's
interesting that there's no visual cue _when an email is sent_ that
distinguishes between sending to a single individual or a group of people, or
an even larger group of people.

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stcredzero
_It's interesting that there's no visual cue when an email is sent that
distinguishes between sending to a single individual or a group of people, or
an even larger group of people._

Pure gold!

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OSTwister
I think it's nice for a UI to show you things in a way you can respond to on
an almost instinctive level, but will it help with UI designers who just don't
think?

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fjabre
Completely 100% agreed. Apple already knows this which is why is makes such
heavy use of animations and lavish graphics in its UIs.

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bobwaycott
For my daily work of pounding out code, I'd certainly want none of this going
on. I always disable silly OS animations. However, for my 2 kids who instantly
'get' my iPhone and iPad but feel less secure with my MacBook, I think Movie
OS is the kind of thing that would convey useful meaning ... until they
understood it all and the varnish wears off and they're asking how to disable
the Movie so they can work with the OS.

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danhon
I completely agree - expanding the UI palette lets you use more varied, subtle
(or less so) tools in different contexts for different audiences. People who
_already understand_ the consequences of their actions may not want/need to be
constantly reminded.

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bensummers
Those of us who are perfectly happy to interact with our computers through a
command line are a vanishingly small proportion of people who use a computer.

But those of us who dwell in a black screen with white monospaced text and a
flashing cursor need to make more human interfaces if we are to make computers
more accessible. Movie OS is possibly overkill, but devices like the iPad show
promising signs of progress in HCI.

~~~
danhon
Yes. We need to get other people - people skilled in communicating to large
audiences (and these people exist: they just exist as advertisers, graphic
novelists, film directors, storyboard artists etc) involved in how we design
our interfaces for everyone else, for the people who don't want to use a CLI.

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rythie
To me, many of the issues are the computer telling the user about stuff they
shouldn't have to worry about. For example, wouldn't cloud computing solve
most of these problems by not giving the responsibility for the problem to the
user?

 _Change your battery_ You shouldn't lose your work if the battery fails

 _Formatting this volume..._ People would not do sys. admin themselves like
this

 _Permanent delete_ With storage so large nowadays, there is no particular
reason to delete something for space reasons.

 _Disk full_ Shouldn't happen, in the cloud it could never happen, you just
get charged more. Gmail for example was designed never to get full.

 _Checking for software_ In the cloud it would always be upto. date

 _Downloading messages progress bar_ Well with web apps it's either loaded or
it's not.

Of course these are not the only problems, but are the type that are most
difficult for users because they are more about sys. admin than getting the
task done.

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danhon
I disagree, but I can see where you're coming from based on the examples I
picked (which were all biased toward operating system maintenance actions,
given the source material).

From the point of view of a naive user, there are new types of interactions
that can have massive social implications: e.g. changing Facebook relationship
status. At the moment, the notification of that status change to the user is
pretty minimal. It does not, for example, make clear that that change will be
propagated to, say, over 500 people, and all of their contacts.

There may be people who are more concerned about their social standing than
whether they've accidentally formatted a volume or not.

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rythie
Well really the problem with Facebook is that's too complex.

Though I'd agree there are non-sys admin problems that people have, but the
worst problems are all sys. admin type ones, viruses, out of space, slowness.

The user-space stuff is nice to have, though the movies tend to have some
impressive visualization and lots of data (like floorplans, schematics etc.)
in order to show things like that. Facebook could maybe show a picture of your
500 friends and say "sending..." though.

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OSTwister
You almost make it sound like it would only show you it's going out to 500
friends _after_ you clicked the button. :D

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rythie
Well a decent undo would fix that

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OSTwister
Undo is good, but I can't help but chuckle at the thought of "Whoops! He's not
really my boyfriend" going out to 500 acquaintances 20 seconds after the
opposite statement.

