Fantasy Computers

The other night, I found myself watching Iron Man 2.  (Yeah, on cable.  I know...)  I enjoyed it, being an old Iron Man fan from ages back.  (I actually had a subscription for Iron Man comics, back in the day.  When I was in college...)  (Yeah, I know...)

Of course, I start looking at the techie stuff they have in the film.  The real tech they used as set dressing.  I remember from the first film that the computer on Stark's desk was a Dell XPS M2010, and it appears that the same computer was on the desk in the second film.  Basically a Vista system showing a fantasy interface.  While the XPS is a visually interesting design (Write that down, I actually complimented a Dell!), I always thought they could do better.  And without having to go the way of they did with the wild stuff they show in Stark's garage lab...

Don't you think Stark would've had something a bit cooler on his desk.  (You know where I'm headed with this, right?)  Honestly, I was thinking about something like the Cube.  Or like the old NextCube or NextStation.  Or, hey, even like a keyboard-ed HP TC1100 (kinda small, but....  They could just show the system sitting on the desk, and then show something like a doctored-up version of "Project Looking Glass" running on the screen.

Project Looking Glass screenshot from the Wikipedia article linked above.

My opinion, but I really think they should've gone retro-techie with the Stark character.

But, then again, no one is listening to me, so...

However, someone is thinking retro, like me.  Check out the "Starkintosh" from "Matt's Macintosh" over on YouTube.  Darn Cool!

There's a whole world out there of "fantasy user interface" designers out there.  Some work for Hollywood, and you see their work in a variety of films.  Others just do it for the fun of it.  (I can't remember all the URLs out there.  There's a cool article from NPR on the subject HERE.

And I think that's enough silliness for the evening.  Time to shut the Cube down and try to dig all the junk off the bed...