Iron Man 3D interface

So this film set off quite the discussion on the iXda list the other day, and led to a lot of very cool links to the sci-fi movie software interface digerati.

It took me a while to find a screen shot to use with this post - it seems there are few images of the bally-hooed interface, but Jason Wong was kind enough to post a movie clip of the scene - shown is where Mr. Downey is about to put his hand into a holographic autocad drawing and test out the fit.

So, we were curious as to who was responsible for the graphics - and it seems that cool movie interface scene is dominated by a very few people, and one in particular: Mark Coleran.

Here are some more links related to Mark:
Here he chimes on a Motion Graphics forum
His Flickr Account

Now, back to the cool interface thread - it lead also to a lot of real world experimental gestural interfaces:
Rendering for an Interactive 360º Light Field Display

Oblong the former MIT kids who worked on the gestural interface for Minority Report - along with Schematic - and also science advised the Iron Man movie.

The other cool interface in Iron Man is Stark's 'heads up display' , built by the ever cooler Pixel Liberation Front

Links to more cool reels (including the Minority Report stuff) can be found on Del.icio.us

This guy has figured out how to use a wii-mote to track finger positions and head positions.

Dan Saffer posted this true 3D gesture to 3D model drawing system.

However, Bruce Sterling (an author books that would make cool movies) is the sci-fi interface buzz kill.

cross-platform PNGs

I am about to post a "best viewed in firefox" tag on my website, because I am changing all the gifs I am using to PNGs, and I am too a) lazy and b) busy and c) annoyed to implement the following solution that will allow IE 6.x to properly render my pages.

But, I think that this is a great article, so I am linking to it for all you designers who DO want to take the time to code this up:

PNGs in IE 6.x

tip o' the hat to Jack from the wwwac list

inverse interface

apple does it again - after using a multi-touch interface for the new iphone, they had to figure a new way to improve the UI...

as BoyGenius says in the scoop on this not ready for market device:

"In a patent filed by Apple right before January's MacWorld where they announced the iPhone, shows a smaller double-sided device. It has phone functions, but one side is touch screen, while the other side is the display. The patent describes this as a way to keep smudges off the display while using multi-touch instead of a stylus on the back. This reminds us a little of the Samsung UpStage phone with dual sides and a touch interface on the back. Will it be easy to control the iPod though, while reaching around back? The device looks much smaller then the iPhone, and could be plans for a 2nd generation iPhone, or even an iPhone nano. This patent seemingly will impact not only future iPhones, but iPods as well. Who wouldn't love to see a dual-sided multi-touch iPod?"

Multi-touch taken to the next level, solving the "fat finger blocking the thing you are trying to click" problem...

I can see this sort of interface as bizzare to use the first few times, and ubiquitous in 10 years.