5 Awesome Sci-Fi Movie Technologies That'd Suck In Real Life
Why are we still driving non-flying cars to our non-space workplaces while fantasizing about our merely two-boobed prostitutes? Where are all the snazzy gadgets and awesome technologies movies promised us? In many cases, they're right here. We just don't use them because, well, they kinda suck. Like how ...
Controlling Computers With Hand Gestures Is Awful
In Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a future cop who tries to warn everyone that Max von Sydow is evil, but no one will believe him, even though he's clearly Max von Sydow. But what most people remember best are the scenes wherein Cruise controls his futuristic crime lab computer by waving his arms around.
How cool is that? Instead of having to say "enhance" and then clicking a boring old mouse, Cruise picks up files and videos from the air itself, and explores them using simple gestures. Soon, other movies were jumping in on this hot futuristic action. From Iron Man 2 ...
... to Prometheus ...
... to Star Trek: Discovery.
Why We're Not Using This Today:
As everyone who has ever owned a Kinect knows, this crap gets old fast. The biggest issue is that your arms get tired very quickly if you hold them up for even a short period of time. If you make that a long time, the feeling gets absolutely excruciating. Engineers actually identified this problem in the '80s, and even gave it a name: the "gorilla arm" effect. You know, because your arms get "sore, cramped, and oversized," and you end up looking and feeling like a gorilla. Not even a cool sci-fi cyborg gorilla like in Congo.
Take another look at that Minority Report scene. When Cruise goes to shake Colin Farrell's hand, he accidentally moves a bunch of files he's working on. That would happen all the time. Imagine you're holding 350 slides that took you five hours to organize and you suddenly get an itch on your butt:
Any interface that lies flat and gives you a wide range of control -- even if you only move your hands a few inches -- would beat this thing ... hands down. If only we had something like that!
Sci-Fi Holograms Are Inferior To 2D Images In Almost Every Way
If somebody in a sci-fi movie needs to look at something important, a paltry two dimensions simply will not do. They need holograms for absolutely everything, even when audio alone would do the job. Like in Star Wars, when R2-D2 shows Leia's holographic recording to a horned up Luke:
Here it is again in The Last Starfighter:
And here's a dude's head popping out of a monitor on Star Trek: Discovery:
Hell, even the highly advanced race of spacefaring giants who created mankind love holograms! From Prometheus:
Why We're Not Using This Today:
You may have noticed something about the holograms above: They A) look like crap, B) are completely pointless, or C) both. That pretty much sums up holograms in the real world, too. Remember that time Tupac's blue ghost crashed a Snoop Dogg performance? And remember how the company responsible went bankrupt soon thereafter? Turns out there isn't much real use for blurry, semi-transparent 3D projections that cause eye strain if you look at them for too long.
Even the nicest example is so fuzzy and transparent that it's not clear why you would bother with it over a 2D video feed. In the 2017 Ghost In The Shell, a hologram is used to reconstruct a murder scene, but it's so imprecise (red tint, kinda blurry, semi-transparent) that it's hard to think of a use for it other than making up for the investigator's chronic lack of imagination.
In Prometheus (again!), the Weyland Corporation's holograms don't have a tint, but they're so transparent that everyone on the crew probably ended up with a migraine anyway.
If you absolutely need to communicate visual information over a vast distance, why would you choose this technology? Think of the bandwidth charges! We already know the future doesn't have Net Neutrality.
Nobody Likes Video Calls (Except In The Movies)
With the possible exception of flying cars and sex-bots, no technology shows up in sci-fi movies as often as video calls. Whether they're discussing something of galaxy-shattering importance or reminding their spouse to buy eggs, everybody in the future does everything via video calls. We see it in ...
... and like a million other movies. We'll stop now, or we'll be here all day.
Why We're Not Using This Today:
We are! Video calling is finally a reality! And it sucks. Seriously, unless it's for Twitch streaming, nobody uses it. And it's easy to see why.
You can take voice calls in almost any situation where you can talk, but if you take a video call, you have to look like a decently dressed, reasonably groomed human being. Plus, you have to make sure you didn't leave something like, say, a giant pink dildo visible in the background. Which has happened. On the BBC.
And yet sci-fi characters love this technology so much that they'll literally risk their lives to use it. In 2017's Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, right as the characters are leaving a planet's orbit, the face of their boss pops up smack dab in the middle of their ship's front viewport. That could kill you while you're driving a car, let alone piloting a spaceship.
Super Advanced Robots Always Have Needlessly Terrible Vision
One of the coolest types of shots is when we go inside a robot's head to see the way they look at the world. Like in the Terminator movies, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger sees everything through a badass red filter, with a bunch of important-looking numbers and text readouts:
Or the recent RoboCop remake, where the Robo-Vision (that's the official name, look it up) shows everything in an old-timey reddish sepia tone, with, again, added text and data prompts:
Why We're Not Using This Today:
Look at any decent first-person shooting game. The status bars and prompts are always minimal and in the corners of the screen. If they took up 30 percent of your monitor, like in the examples above, the developers would have angry nerds with actual guns outside their houses. All those big letters and numbers are covering up important visual information, allowing AmishTeabaggz42069 to sneak up and shoot you in the head. And what are they even there for? Terminators have computers for brains. Why do they need to see the data they themselves are processing?
On top of that, the obligatory red tint makes these killer robots effectively colorblind, and prevents them from easily distinguishing between, say, blood and other liquids, which you'd think would be important in their line of work. At the other end of the spectrum, we have medical robots like Baymax from Big Hero 6, whose internal HUD looks like this:
All those widgets are probably helpful for a robot that patches up humans, but that blue tint ... isn't. Baymax needs to see his patients as accurately as possible, not just to identify any physical symptoms, but also to make treatment easier. It's been demonstrated that blue light hinders injections, since it's harder to find a vein under the patient's skin.
Meanwhile, in Chappie, the law-enforcing robots that patrol the streets are all apparently equipped with crappy late '90s webcams. Imagine trying to shoot the correct criminal if this was what you saw:
To be fair, all these examples are still an improvement over 1973's Westworld, wherein the highly advanced Yul Brynner robot, whose sole purpose is to shoot people in gunfights, can't even tell a fork from a spoon.
Computer Screens In Science Fiction Movies Are Worse Than The Ones We Have Today
In sci-fi movies, computer screens are elaborate displays of carefully matched colors and captivating animations (even when no one's using them). They're all packed with graphs and numbers and all sorts of doubtlessly essential information. Marvel at the snazzy monitors in 2009's Star Trek ...
... and Avatar ...
... and naturally, good ol' Prometheus:
Why We're Not Using This Today:
We lose ten minutes of work time every time a pigeon lands outside our window. If you had to do your job next to a bunch of huge screens that kept looping through colorful graphics, you'd probably get quite distracted. And if your own screen insisted on performing a lovely animation every time you updated some data or asked for an analysis, you'd probably start daydreaming about Microsoft Excel for the first time in your life.
In almost every sense, these sci-fi screens are a huge step backwards compared to what we have now. Nearly all of them have low contrast (making it harder to read things at a glance) and a grand total of four colors, all of which are usually variations of blue and green. The Avengers:
Mars (a National Geographic miniseries):
Prometheus:
Not only does this mean that you run out of ways to highlight important stuff quickly, but the preponderance of blue and lack of red tones can even be dangerous. See, when your eyes have adapted to a dark environment, light of any color except red will disrupt that adaptation. This is called the Purkinje effect. That's why interfaces for things like submarines and airplanes use a lot of red, which allows, for example, pilots flying at night to clearly see both the screen and the view outside their cockpit. But on the other hand, blue looks neater, so that's a fair tradeoff.
These sci-fi screens fail at the most basic function of a user interface: conveying information quickly and easily. Everything important is hidden in dense blocks of tiny text and numbers scattered around the screen. The only way the following screenshots make sense is if the characters have superhuman vision or magnifying glasses:
For comparison, here is a real-life NASA mission control room:
Note the lack of flashy animated visualizations. The multiple high-contrast colors. The text that is readable when you're at the intended distance. And Earth has yet to be attacked by alien invaders. Coincidence? We don't think so.
Prometheus isn't a bad movie, but please make sure you've seen Alien before watching Prometheus. We talk about that movie a lot on this site too.
If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.
For more check out Supervillain Gadgets That Are Hilarious In Retrospect and 6 Sci-Fi Movie Technologies That Went Stupidly Backwards.
Also follow us on Facebook. Coolio.
