![[Pasted image 20250203222521.png]] # Interfaces of Future Past Watching Solo Leveling I noticed that every time the player interface came up I would feel mildly annoyed. What's the thing about the interface that bugs me? It's not just that it's trying too hard, it's that it fundamentally misunderstands why game interfaces look the way they do; Game UI evolved to solve specific problems: conveying critical information quickly, maintaining immersion, balancing complexity with readability. solo leveling's interface is cosplaying functionality. In a world of monsters and dungeons (some dragons even), how can it be that the interface is just a simple rectangle? The series quickly tries to make you forget it's even there. As you progress through season 1 and 2 the interface comes up extremely rarely, but it's obvious that the protagonist is interacting with it in more and more natural ways. How the shift from annoying black rectangle to completely integrated into the flow of action happened is never shown on screen or explained. And that's a misstep. Interfaces are important and interesting as concepts, sure, but media is really unforgiving about them. They are the window in which characters interact with a big part of the world around them and the feel they have tells you a lot about the state of the world in that moment. The pipboy tells you a tale with a glance, you understand the history of that world. The amount of thought put into interfaces (or lack thereof) is often a predictor of the quality of the work in general. The best interfaces in pieces of media in my opinion are found in Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner and Dune and the common element between them is that the goal was to make it futuristic but retro in feel. ![[Pasted image 20250202001424.png]] [Check out this article about UIs in animes, btw, great work](https://luciannovo.medium.com/ui-in-japanese-anime-8339de0883a4). These are great because they try to appear futuristic to the viewer but old to ancient for the world portrayed. These futures are so future that this is old news to them, the plastic has had the time to yellow, the world has moved on. The concept of an interface seems to be retro in feel, a new interface is something to learn, and the trend is to absolve people of that work. ## This is about you Think back to what you see when you interact with your iPhone or your smartphone in general. You are looking at the result of countless minds looking at a slab of glass and thinking about how *you* would interact with it. You have lived through history and it all happened in your pocket, one app update at a time, the times you upgraded your phone, the time you bought a new laptop. Every swipe, every tap, a data point, the discovery of how humans talk to the machine. When the iphone came out, the winning design, the thesis, was skeumorphism - digital interfaces mimic physical objects faithfully - the YouTube app looked like a tv, the Calendars had torn paper effects, iBooks (which was fire) had yellowing paper and "realistic" page turning effects. This was picked to help the move from the physical to the digital for a population still learning to interact with touchscreens. Every person, not just the working populace was supposed to have a smartphone, you couldn't design something just for the blackberry and tie guys if you wanted mass appeal. The antithesis emerged around 2013 with iOS 7 and Android's Holo UI - a rebellion against skeuomorphism that stripped interfaces down to their platonic ideals. Buttons became simple rectangles, textures vanished, and everything became flat. This shift, emblematic of successful distribution, cultural victory, we no longer needed the training wheels of physical metaphors. We were dancing in the hyper uranium of ideals. Then came the synthesis. Minimal designs but with shadows and depth, a gritty feel. Modern interfaces use shadows and physics-based animations to leverage our innate understanding of space and movement rather than mimic the existing. They create new objects that would be impossible in the physical world, while respecting the basic rules of our universe - things have weight, cast shadows, and exist in space. ## There is another Interior design is the art of designing the biggest interface you interact with during your day, physical objects with form and functions associated to each. That too followed the same pattern - from maximalist through stark minimalism, to today's balanced approach of minimalism with intentional accents. "This is where you eat" framed in your kitchen, "sleep" engraved on your pillows are cringe in the same way that screaming in public is; suggests communication issues. This parallel evolution points to a possible merge of the two. My bet is on some flavor of ambient computing - interfaces that fade into the environment, responding to context rather than demanding attention. The future might not look like the floating holograms of science fiction, but rather like a well-designed room: everything you need, exactly where you expect it, without having to think about it.