
UI Screen Graphics: The Martian [video] - ingve
http://www.territorystudio.com/work/motion/?p=Martian
======
andreyf
Does anyone else get bothered by the lack of realism in flashy mockups like
this? I get that it's 15 years in the future, but are fading ellipses over-
imposed on a video of Mars really going to be what NASA looks at to visualize
a trajectory?

This goes for the rest of the movie, too: the astrophysicist so nerdy who
doesn't understand what a boss is (do those really exist?), why does he need
to go to a datacenter to plug in and run a proof verifier, or is the audience
deemed so stupid as to not get it or be impressed if he were typing into his
computer "coq --verify-proof maneuver.v"? I'm not saying everything needs to
be accurate without a hair out of place, but it seems unlikely that moving a
file from one laptop to another will animate the application that has the file
open in the direction of the other laptop before popping it up there, and it
hurts the movie to see it.

I feel as if this movie was a great way to educate people and get them excited
about at least a little bit of the details involved in science and space
exploration, and really hurt that mission by putting an Equinox gym into space
and flashy unrealistic UI's everywhere.

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eco
The screen graphics are actually the thing that bothered me the most about the
film. Some of them were fantastic, some of them were ridiculous.

The CALCULATIONS CORRECT was the worst but there was a clear problem with font
sizing in general. The fonts were either way too small on all the detail
oriented screens or way too large (whenever the moviegoer was supposed to read
something). Just look at the huge overhead screen at mission control. The text
is too small for almost anyone in the room to read. Same goes with the control
panels in the mars surface vehicle. You may say that SpaceX's Dragon 2 control
panel[1] is pretty similar except those screens are at least twice as big and
the astronaut is seated extremely close to them.

I'm sure the details of the screens are nice and accurate (they seem to have
taken quite a bit of pride in that) but they felt like they were trying to
make them so technical looking to impress the audience that they became
unusable for the astronauts themselves.

The ridiculous, alignment animating photos from Pathfinder annoyed me greatly
too but just because it looked so silly and unnecessary (and I'm normally a
fan of animations to add a little extra information to a scene).

That all said, I liked the film. It's not the book but it's about as good of
adaptation as I could have hoped for.

1\. [http://i.imgur.com/jwhxhkU.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/jwhxhkU.jpg)

~~~
TrevorJ
It's a little tough with films in particular because you don't really have
control over how it will be depicted. Sometimes you might know that a specific
shot will be an insert close of a particular panel, but in general the DP and
director will shoot coverage however they want to on the day boards or no
boards.

You are walking a fine line between believability and something that reads
instantly and clearly for the 2 seconds it is on screen.

Films are littered with stuff that will break your suspension of disbelief,
depending on your domain of expertise. Unfortunately for those of us that like
movies with technology in them, we're gonna be able to pick it apart almost
instantly.

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beloch
Overall, The Martian got the science pretty close to right and avoided the
pitfall of turning astronauts into psychopaths or portraying NASA as a bunch
of uniformly suited nerds with pocket protectors. There are nits to be picked,
of course. Martian gravity was not accurately portrayed for obvious reasons of
cost. Winds are portrayed as having orders of magnitude more force than they
would in Martian atmosphere, but it's hard to make the setup work without
that. I can live with that.

The one thing that actually bothered me because it was a simple, dumb, mistake
that had no real purpose or advantage for the film-makers was this: The units
used are all metric, as you'd expect for NASA, _except_ for pressure, which is
reported in psi on multiple interface screens and the hab cam dash. Miles were
also used in dialogue, but you can sort of justify NASA using miles to
communicate with the American public. Myanmar and Liberia will probably
abandon imperial before the U.S. finally does.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Myanmar and Liberia will probably abandon imperial before the U.S. finally
> does.

Pedantic, perhaps, but the US doesn't use imperial units, its uses US
Customary units. These are _sometimes_ identical to imperial units, and in a
few cases where they aren't identical sometimes use the same unit name with a
different definition for measurements in the same dimension as imperial (e.g.,
imperial vs. US gallons.)

~~~
beloch
This is the sort of thing that you know but you forget, and I'm sure it
occasionally bites people in the butt. The U.S. doesn't just use out-dated and
counter-intuitive units of measurement, it overloads their names with other,
slightly different obsolete units of measurement!

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stickydink
Here's an interview with Territory about the movie.

[https://medium.com/@HcSwahn_86152/ui-stories-the-martian-
eff...](https://medium.com/@HcSwahn_86152/ui-stories-the-martian-efffa28e1a98)

------
draw_down
The only thing that struck me as silly was Donald Glover's laptop flashing a
huge "CALCULATIONS CORRECT" dialog. I did notice at one point something that
looked very similar to Lisp code on a screen in the Hermes.

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lucaspiller
This studio also did the graphics for Mission Impossible which had a similar
style:

[http://www.territorystudio.com/work/motion/?p=MissionImpossi...](http://www.territorystudio.com/work/motion/?p=MissionImpossible)

Nice work!

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jordache
They mentioned a lot of the graphics were interactive on-set. Any idea what
web technology are they outputting this to? Flash?

~~~
Raphmedia
Most likely Flash. It's vector based for crisp display on those huge screens
and a lot of guys are still very comfortable using it. It's very fast to
create mockups with it.

That being said, they could have been using any other product. Perhaps that by
"interactive", they simply mean that when you touch the screen, a .mp4 file
starts playing. Who knows. I would be interested to find out!

~~~
Gracana
Processing would be great for mockups as well, though I have no idea if anyone
uses it for that purpose.

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sdkmvx
The reality is always more mundane.

They showed supposed UI from Pathfinder displays image blocks of varying sizes
in random locations then zooms them all to the right place. It makes a nice
effect for the uninitiated, but I have trouble understanding why a computer
would act like that.

You can see that the real NASA uses fvwm and xv to display images from Mars.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Au-S-
tjyiU&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Au-S-
tjyiU&feature=youtu.be&t=2220)

~~~
copperx
Since I was a kid, after I see a movie I ask myself, why aren't real UIs like
the movies? would it be an HCI nightmare to have an interface like that?

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joeyspn
Not bad, but IMO still pretty standard HUD-like user interface. There are
thousands of kits for getting a nice kickstart designing those, in vector or
VFX [0]. What I like the most is the typography.

[0] [http://videohive.net/item/quantum-hud-
infographic/8678174?re...](http://videohive.net/item/quantum-hud-
infographic/8678174?ref=wisset)

------
professorumbra
The UI designs are cool, however I noticed they misspelled Tempe Terra in some
of the maps. I like these kind of videos and the UI designs in many movies are
interesting. The ones in Oblivion were especially great. You can find it here:
[http://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX](http://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX).

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orf
Those UI screens look gorgeous, but are they really practical? By that I mean
the software-based buttons. Would they be used in something this critical,
surely a physical switch/button (maybe as a backup?) would be far better in
this kind of situation?

That being said most of those displays look like information displays rather
than control panels.

~~~
elihu
Switches fail, too. It does make sense to move as much as they can to
software, since it saves weight and cost and you can have one generic human-
input device as opposed to a whole wall of switches, buttons, knobs, and
indicators.

~~~
copperx
MTBF of a Cherry switch is around 1,000,000 clicks.

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ChuckMcM
Thanks for that, I really need to figure out how to make cluster management UI
sexy. I've noticed that dashboards are great but unless they are "nice" to
look at folks will simply tune them out. There is so much potential with 4k
screens these days.

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noir_lord
Anyone know what the font used in these screens was?

I googled but couldn't find it.

~~~
Mindless2112
Gridnik [1].

[1]
[https://twitter.com/territorystudio/status/65433800586446438...](https://twitter.com/territorystudio/status/654338005864464384)

------
Terr_
There are some amusing bits... At 1:38 it suggests Saturn orbits at a radius
of 25 light-years from the sun. ("50 L.Y." in the upper left.)

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Bluestrike2
Semi-related question: why is all the consumer tech in a movie set in the
2030s circa 2015?

~~~
mynameisvlad
Well, it _is_ the government, so about 15 years too old sounds about right. :)

~~~
Bluestrike2
In space? Sure, there's always a lag between what's used when a mission is
planned and when it's actually implemented. But I'm including all the scenes
on Earth where you have televisions and cell phones, etc. And the GoPros all
over Mars? Somehow, I can't see those lasting for 20+ years in NASA's stores.

~~~
mynameisvlad
thatsthejoke.jpg.

But seriously, the government is always hopelessly behind on times. Hell, the
US Navy paid Microsoft millions in a support contract for XP
([http://www.computerworld.com/article/2939435/government-
it/u...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2939435/government-it/us-navy-
paid-millions-to-stay-on-windows-xp.html)) earlier this year. Coincidentally,
XP was RTM'ed just over 14 years ago.

------
gavazzy
1:03 -- "encripted information"

~~~
davidaa
I noticed that too. They couldn't even spell check?

~~~
M2Ys4U
Maybe that's the accepted spelling in 20 years' time? :P

~~~
TrevorJ
That just made me think...could you poison Google's 'did you mean...' feature
that we sometimes use as a defacto spellcheck by seeding the web with a
consistently misspelled word all over the place?

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Mithaldu
Some of this stuff looks like cellphone ui sensibilities. Any real scientist
would rather get violent on you than getting shot into space with a device
that has the movie equivalent of a spinner gif.

