3d interface

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

A short clip from the film Idiocracy showing a hospital reception computer where staff pick a condition from a board of simple pictorial buttons.

A short compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

A three-minute demo of ProFORMA, a system from Cambridge that builds textured 3D models live from a video of an object.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

Debris by Farbrausch, the winner of the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition. All of its 3D visuals, textures and music come from a single 177 KB executable.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

A 2008 CES demo of the original Microsoft Surface, a smart table with multi-touch interaction. It shows touch manipulation of photos and objects on a tabletop display.

A short CSI clip in which characters try to track a killer's IP address by writing a Visual Basic GUI. It is a famous example of absurd TV hacking.

World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

A clip in which Eben Moglen tells how he grew up when software was freer and how his path crossed Richard Stallman's. He describes how they came to work together to make software free again.

An edited excerpt of Steve Jobs introducing Mac OS X at Macworld San Francisco in 2000. It covers the Aqua interface, Quartz graphics built on PDF, and the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa application environments.

A 256-byte MS-DOS intro that renders a raymarched, procedural 3D animation. It won the 256-byte competition at Riverwash 2009 and the scene.org award for best technical achievement that year, and the author published commented x86 assembly source.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.

A classic Norwegian TV comedy sketch from NRK's show Oystein og jeg, subtitled in English, in which a monk calls a helpdesk to learn how to use a book instead of a scroll.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.