Honestly seems like a pretty stock "Hollywood Sci-Fi UI on Transparent Glass".
It's fine, don't get me wrong, but if you focus on any of the shots and start thinking "what does this mean" the illusion falls apart instantly. You'd find out it's just bunch of random shapes, lines and squiggles in most cases, that have pretty much no informational value, no matter what they're supposed to convey.
The transparent screens are universally known to be utterly impractical in the real world, but they add visual complexity to the shot, hence why they are stubbornly persistent in movies and series.
Also another classic which reminds me of 2Advanced's sites: tiny blocks of unreadable text (and yes I mean unreadable to the movie character, not us). In the future no one reads, apparently, they just slap tiny Lorem Ipsum on everything for decorative purposes.
Speaking of lorem ipsum, there's a scene of The Expanse that's meant to convey the busyness of the ship traffic around them.
When I paused and zoomed in, I expected to find that some studio graphic designer put Edward Tufte-like levels of planning into a high quality, high volume display of realtime objects in this universe.
Instead, it turned out to be a looped display of ADS-B aircraft tracks around some busy tourist airport which to your point, adds to the visual complexity.
Keep in mind Edward Tufte died like 250 years earlier. Most of the UIs are probably developed by Belters who made a career change after a 6 month coding bootcamp on Ceres.
Dare I mention another thing called Observation[0]?
It's a game you play as a computer to help a human to figure stuff out #HowToNotSpoilThings. Not sure why a computer needs an UI, but the UI design is really good. What makes it even better is that it's a game so almost all UI elements are "functional" instead of just be there look pretty.
Did you watch the show? It's not only that they were transparent, some screens took no space at all when powered off. Biggest example is their "phones".
Most, if not all, screens have useful information. Sure, maybe the unreadable small print has gibberish to fill up space for aesthetic reasons, but whatever is readable in a scene(even in the background) will usually make sense. Names of ships, status of systems, ship paths, you name it.
Yes, of course, the UI most often has THE_THING_WE_ARE_TALKING_ABOUT. Sci-fi UI in the 60s was a TV screen showing THE_THING_WE_ARE_TALKING_ABOUT surrounded by hundreds of randomly blinking lamps with switches (all of them with no labels). Today it's a virtual screen showing THE_THING_WE_ARE_TALKING_ABOUT surrounded by dozens of concentric circles, squares and random icons, lines and tiny unreadable text. Frankly things haven't changed much. That's really not what real UI is in most cases, but that's fine.
As for the holograms. I get it, holograms are convenient. They're especially convenient because you can show the character's face and body as they work with a hologram BEHIND the hologram. Otherwise you have to awkwardly show a TV screen covering most of your own TV screen, and it makes for boring framing, and a boring show.
But that's the thing. They're convenient for framing the shots, and for looking conventionally "futuristic". But otherwise such stuff pulls me out of whatever I'm watching rather quickly. Because a magical holographic display that produces image just like that, in the air, with no projection target, is frankly silly.
I give Star Wars a pass, because it's a western/fantasy, not actually sci-fi. But for a sci-fi that's trying to be gritty and realistic, it kinda bothers me, because it's kinda lazy and uninspired. Even if we could, no one would design a UI where you're waving your hands in front of your face all day in empty air with dimly lit thin lines that're supposed to show you whatever you're working on.
Also holograms look distinctly added in, because while they light up themselves, their light doesn't reflect from anything around them. Sometimes they try to correct for this by adding some blue or red fill lights in front of an actor's face, but it still looks quite fake.
I don't know where the balance is, because as I said, a show can't really be like reality. Reality of using computer UI is rather boring, and will be boring for centuries to come. But also a lot of what we see in the Expanse UI effects are old, established, somewhat tired UI tropes, and while I respect the work of everyone involved, they're merely "does the job" level. There's no attempt to rethink anything, or try something new. In that sense, BTW, Battlestar Galactica was a breath of fresh air, because it chose to go simple and retro. And it looked fine.
> holograms look distinctly added in, because while they light up themselves, their light doesn't reflect from anything around them
This is true in general but not really fair feedback for The Expanse specifically as shown in the article. I was pleasantly surprised by how their holographic devices actually illuminate their hands, you can see that in a few of the screenshots. The prop has built-in lighting that merges nicely with the projected UI.
Assuming we avoid extinction, computer UIs will probably be symbiotic by then. THE_THING_WE_ARE_TALKING_ABOUT will still be prominent, but only conceptually.
Busy glass blinkies - holo or not - will look about as convincing as the Flash Gordon cockpit does today.
A long time ago there was a Russian movie called Solaris directed by Tarkovsky. It featured a bizarre library-in-a-space-station which completely subverted the usual SF tropes.
I'd expect more of that in the distant future. If you're going to have space travel, you might as well be comfortable, cultured, and brain-interfaced.
An interesting take on the lighting issues, and one that would be easy to show instead of tell in TV, would be to use mixed reality.
Have the displays show up when focus character puts on glasses, disappear when without them, and possibly even enhance the "otherness" aspect of the displays.
BTW, your example about showing screen in TV reminded me of, iirc, pilot episode of Babylon 5 - where camera suddenly cuts to Amiga-rendered ID card filling the whole screen (rotoscoping it otherwise would be too costly at the time).
I feel like I've seen this article a few times, and it's neat I guess? As a developer though, none of these UI designs catch my eye. They look generic (if bordering on cheesy) and they don't actually document any of the interesting parts of the process here either.
It's fine, don't get me wrong, but if you focus on any of the shots and start thinking "what does this mean" the illusion falls apart instantly. You'd find out it's just bunch of random shapes, lines and squiggles in most cases, that have pretty much no informational value, no matter what they're supposed to convey.
The transparent screens are universally known to be utterly impractical in the real world, but they add visual complexity to the shot, hence why they are stubbornly persistent in movies and series.
Also another classic which reminds me of 2Advanced's sites: tiny blocks of unreadable text (and yes I mean unreadable to the movie character, not us). In the future no one reads, apparently, they just slap tiny Lorem Ipsum on everything for decorative purposes.