How Star Trek Artists Imagined the iPad... 23 Years Later 324
MorderVonAllem submitted an incredibly cool article about the computers and set design of Star Trek. If you are into that sort of thing, you're going to really like this one. It says "There are a lot of similarities between Apple's iPad and the mobile computing devices—known as PADDs—used in the Star Trek universe. Ars spoke to designers Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler to find out the thinking and inspiration behind the PADD and how closely the iPad represents a real-life incarnation of that dream."
two words: (Score:3, Interesting)
Prior Art!
iPad vs PADD (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty apparent that the set designers on ST:TNG were visionaries. It's pretty difficult to accurately envision the future, even if it's only 20 years ahead of time. Credit needs to be given to those guys. I just hope that Apple had the decency to give them free iPads when they were released.
Nah. It'd be Gates yelling ... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Make it look more like the Mac."
The PADD is just the display portion of the iPad.
It would have come as a very great surprise to people in the 80s how microelectronics have changed the face what is actually possible.
The limitations of the iPad are ones of the physical limitations of human being holding them.
Your arms are only so strong, so long and so jointed.
The electronics and computing power we can cram into those dimensions may grow as Moore's Law continues apace but our arms and our eyes aren't going to change.
Re:not quite. (Score:5, Interesting)
Usually, but not always. ISTR them being used interactively during engineering diagnostics and for data entry in Sickbay.
I do recall an interview in the early 90's where Micheal Okuda stated that a PADD could act like any main display [like the ones on the bridge] and thus, in theory, one could operate the entire ship while strolling down a corridor with a PADD in hand. My copies of the technical manual have long since been consigned to the basement, but I believe those [theoretical] capabilities were discussed there as well.
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the article makes specific points that itis similar to the iPad over other tablets. This primarily comes from the fact that the Okudas specifically focused on ease of use and interfaces that could change to fit the needs of the story (and thus the needs of the fictional user). This is quite a bit different from most of the tablets that came before, those that relied on styluses and desktop OS's, enforcing paradigms that worked much better for a mouse keyboard.
Once some decent Android(or MeeGo, or WebOS, or Windows Phone 7) tablets come out, and I'm sure they will, lest someone think me a mere fanboy, that won't be true anymore. But for now the comparison is quite apt for the iPad in particular.
Re:Rubric for e-reader ubiquity (Score:3, Interesting)
Great observation!
Current technology in the iPad, while quite decent, is still quite fragile. I was discussing the pros and cons of the Kindle and the iPad to some family members, and they were asking what were some of the "cons" of these devices. Among other things, I said, "Well, you can step on a book and it won't shatter, you can drop a book in a puddle, shake it off, and it's usually still readable." The point being that books, while taking up far more space than e-versions, they are amazingly rugged and durable--something that the likes of the Kindle or iPad can't yet claim.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not even convinced they originated the idea on Star Trek. I don't have a copy to hand to check, but I vaguely recall Arthur C. Clark writing something about Heywood Floyd reading a newspaper on an electronic tablet like device while en route to the moon in "2001: A Space Odyssey", which was published in 1968.
It's been awhile since I read the book, but in the film, it seems to be a reading device, not a general-purpose tablet computer. IE its interaction appears limited to the equivalent of flipping through a newspaper, as opposed to running applications.
On the topic of the PADD, I've been making my way through the various Star Trek series, and one of the things that's really struck me is how even though the Federation has access to advanced computing power and networking technology, crew members still physically hand each other PADDs to transfer information. In some cases, they'll end up with piles of PADDs on their desks if they're studying a particular topic in depth.
At first I thought that this was something along the lines of how William Gibson didn't think to include cellphones in Neuromancer, because essentially everyone was still using payphones back then. But after more reflection, maybe the Star Trek staff were just more forward-thinking and assumed some sort of draconian DRM scheme that locks data to a particular physical device :).
23 Years... LATER? (Score:3, Interesting)
Twenty Three years later than what? Maybe you mean 23 years *after* Stanley Kubrick envisioned the iPad in 1968 for the movie 2001?
Stanley was off by only 9 years, a pretty good prediction, and unlike Star Trek, which almost never showed anything on the PADD, in 2001, the characters are shown watching full-screen, wirelessly streamed video to the tablet.
Frankly, the PADD was a easy device to envision, especially since you see Kirk dealing with essentially the same device in almost every TOS episode (It's a clipboard with lights).
And for some reason, the best part about TOS was gone from every Rick Berman Star Trek that followed: the background jibber-jabber on the bridge, that stuff about "gravity is down to point-eight" that is heard to make the bridge sound like there's A LOT going on... All the other bridges are dead-quiet, even the "earlier" NX-01 Enterprise.
Anyhow; Point is: Nothing new under the sun, and, to anyone who keeps his eyes open, this stuff has been around since long before ST:TNG, it's just that the internet kiddies only remember TNG because that's what *they* grew up with.
Now Get Off My Lawn.
It's ease of access (Score:3, Interesting)
Same reason I keep a note pad next to the keyboard when programming: I'm faster when I can glance at something instead of switching windows.
I do hope in the next 500 years though they come-up with something better though. Pinch and move a-la iPad is neat, but I still can't fit everything I need into one spot.
-Matt
Re:Modernizing textual inferfaces (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not claiming Emacs is perfect
Now just stop right there, I'll say in fact it is. :-)
One idea I've had for a terminal application on a touch screen device is something where the auto-completion is context sensitive to the commands - so it would complete commands, then arguments within commands and so on. Like you say, kind of like emacs (or even shell) completion but going further down to every possible item you could type.
One other thing I think could be done is a virtual keyboard specifically designed to enter regular expressions. I have not thought it through much but it just seems like some sort of augmented regular expression builder could be very, very powerful...
I think there's good potential there that's been left largely untapped.
That's really true, there's still a ton of optimization to be had around touch screen entry of very context specific textual data. I totally agree with what you are saying that textual interfaces for specific contexts is not given as much respect as it should be.
That's why I so like virtual keyboards, because they offer the ability to fully customize text entry (even dynamically) for specific tasks.