user interface

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

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

Street interviews of over 50 passersby in Times Square, asked what a browser is. Many answers show people confuse browsers with search engines or the internet.

Kristy Viers demonstrates the iPhone Magnifier combined with VoiceOver to describe the user's surroundings. She shows how the built-in feature reports scenes, faces and lighting.

GE Lighting's official how-to for factory resetting C by GE smart bulbs, using a long sequence of precisely timed on and off cycles.

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

Matthaeus Krenn presents a concept for car touchscreen UI where the screen controls only one thing at a time, designed to suit driving. A tablet prototype accompanies the short demo.

A 2018 vlog showing how to use the windshield wipers on a Tesla Model 3, including auto mode, manual settings and voice commands. It is labeled outdated.

A three-minute Emacs Rocks screencast demonstrating Magit, the Git interface inside Emacs, including staging and other everyday operations.

A satirical Onion Talks episode in which a startup founder explains making money by selling his users' data to oppressive governments. It parodies tech conference talks and monetization of communities.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs in 2010 saying companies should ask users before tracking them, and that people's personal data is like their diary.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A satirical Onion news segment announcing a Google feature that lets users opt out of Google's data collection by moving to a remote village without Google products or sunlight.

A one-minute video of a baby treating a print magazine like a broken iPad, presented as a tribute to Steve Jobs. It makes a point about how touch screens shape the expectations of digital natives.

A one-minute archive video of the 2Advanced Studios v2 website from 2001, a showcase of the elaborate futuristic Flash interfaces the agency was known for.

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

A short video arguing that the iPhone keyboard has gotten worse, showing slow-motion footage of taps registering the wrong letters. It claims the problem is iOS itself rather than user error.

A short clip parodying Windows Vista's cancel-or-allow security prompts, in the style of Apple's Mac vs PC ads.

A short demo of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon's adaptive keyboard row, which changes its keys based on the user's activity.

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

A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.

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.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

A short demo shows how to use the Tesla Model 3's mechanical emergency door release on the front doors as a backup to the electronic release. It notes an on-screen warning that frequent use could damage the door seals.

A short Boeing piece on the retirement of the voice behind the F/A-18 Super Hornet cockpit warning system, nicknamed Bitchin' Betty. It touches on why the stern voice alerts are used.

The short printer-destruction-adjacent clip from Office Space built around the cryptic 'PC LOAD LETTER' error message. It pokes fun at unhelpful printer errors.

A short archival capture of the 2001 Flash website of 2Advanced Studios, an agency known for high-end Flash design. It is part of the Web Design Museum's collection of early web design.

A short WIRED demo from CES 2013 of Tactus Technology's haptic touchscreen, whose panel raises physical bumps to form a keyboard.

Google's 2014 reel introducing Material Design, a visual language based on a paper-and-ink material metaphor and a system of motion. It is a short promotional video.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the 2010 D8 conference, interviewed by Walt Mossberg, defining privacy as people knowing what they are signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly. The discussion centered on location data.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

Celery Man is a short Tim and Eric sketch in which Paul Rudd uses an absurd computer interface. It is a surreal comedy bit from their show.

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 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 short demo of a walking droplet on a vibrating silicone oil bath passing through a double slit and producing interference, a macro-scale analogue of pilot-wave behavior.

A short Not Just Bikes video on continuous sidewalks in the Netherlands, where the sidewalk runs unbroken across side streets so cars must visibly cross pedestrian space. It places them within Dutch sustainable safety and Vision Zero efforts.