I thought I was in the vanguard of tech with all my chatter about Natural User Interfaces (NUI) but I found a new acronym today – FUI – Fantasy User Interface. We all know what they are – they’re the interfaces you see in movies like Mission Impossible 3 and The Bourne series. The man behind them is Mark Coleran and he’s know design director of Bonfire Labs. According to Fast Company’s Co.Design
I watched the video before I read the article and saw a glimpse of something very similar to Apple’s Coverflow from iTunes. Sure enough, in the article Coleran notes that not everything we see is a flight of fancy and his interface for Children of Men preceded Coverflow by nine months. Some of the other UI’s in the films looks over engineered and Coleran explains that a UI that is on screen for a few moments trying to convey information to the moviegoer is somewhat different to a UI you’d use every day.
It’ll be interesting to see if NUI (and things like Kinect, LightSpace etc.) influence his new line of work….and Mark, if you’re ever near Seattle, do drop by. I think you’d enjoy a tour of some of our spaces!
side note: I was reminded how old Bourne Identity is already by the vast array of CRT screens in that shot!
