HTML5 Version of the Tron:Legacy Boardroom Scene

https://www.robscanlon.com/encom-boardroom/

by PleaseHelpMe • 9 years ago

701 66 9 years ago

robscanlon.com

jarym• 9 years ago

Really damn impressive!

raykanani992• 9 years ago

Holy cow. Did you use a charting framework for the stream feed? How did you get such a pretty globe?

arscan8• 9 years ago

All hand built, including the globe. I split that out into it's own library over at https://github.com/arscan/encom-globe

* edit: I did leverage quite a few great libraries, namely three.js... just none that are charting specific

raykanani992• 9 years ago

beauty

thinkpad20• 9 years ago

The term "mad skills" comes to mind. I would love to see a breakdown of some of the techniques he used to construct this.

pmattos• 9 years ago

Very cool stuff... even `ls` works in the shell ;)

DannyDaemonic• 9 years ago

This is beautiful. There needs to be a plugin api for this so we can make our own using charts using the built in command line and associated widgets.

porlune• 9 years ago

I would love that, this is UI art.

sandGorgon• 9 years ago

i would pay for this - as a HUD for company stats

arscan8• 9 years ago

Glad to see some people are getting a kick out of this. I built it a few years back while learning webgl, css3, node.js, redis, and modern (at the time) js tooling. Source over at https://github.com/arscan/encom-boardroom

I didn't build this with any real practical application in mind at the time. But some people have reused components in their own projects over the years, particularly the globe (https://github.com/arscan/encom-globe).

52-6F-62• 9 years ago

Not going to hesitate to toot your horn here, man. This is extremely well done! It's all great!

That globe as an interface itself is worth congratulations and should be an envy.

I'll have to look more into your work.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

I liked the mobile orienteering detection. Looks great on Firefox/Android.

arscan8• 9 years ago

Thanks. I use it on a couple of my projects [1]. Happy to take PRs if anyone has ideas for improvement.

[1] https://github.com/arscan/pleaserotate.js

krock• 9 years ago

All awesome stuff! I'm currently working in the travel industry and immediately after seeing this I'm planning on using the globe for a flights dashboard. ;)

arscan8• 9 years ago

Great! If you end up using it let me know.

tarruda• 9 years ago

Putting the quality of your work aside(which is really amazing), I applaud the self discipline required to develop such a big project on free time alone. Hope to get there one day.

eivindga• 9 years ago

This was beautifully done! Impressive work! :)

indescions_2017• 9 years ago

Oblivion next, please ;)

http://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX

arscan8• 9 years ago

Yeah I considered that one as well. I love all his work.

athenot• 9 years ago

Thanks for pointing to this one. I haven't seen the movie but there's some good representations for dense volumes of data there. I'd like to build some network health representation around this.

enimodas• 9 years ago

Do you have an estimate how long it took to build all that?

emehrkay• 9 years ago

Very cool. I've been thinking of a way to capture this aesthetic on the web. I love what you've done, but I don't know if it works in a browser as well as I envisioned. Great code, I will reference the globe in future projects. Thanks

mattnewton• 9 years ago

This is super cool, I love the from aesthetics (if not the movie).

How do you make you or tapping not zoom again? Is there a HTML meta tag or something? It would improve the usability of the keyboard on mobile.

edpichler• 9 years ago

Wow, beautiful!

thatcherc• 9 years ago

Are there any efforts to make movie-type window styles for real use? The Tron:Legacy style would be a fun one to have, as well as the one used in the computers in Westworld (similar light-blue-on-black)[1] and Interstellar [2]. I'm sure it's a more difficult process than I'm imagining, but it would be really cool to be able to use the window and interface themes of the computers in your favorite show or movie, especially since some have such great designs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikup60uEg0c [2] - https://youtu.be/bmz9lMP6aQU?t=2m4s, visible for a brief second just after 2m4s

Rjevski• 9 years ago

The main problem with this kind of UI is information overload (which is the desired effect in movies, since the viewer isn't actually supposed to "use" nor understand all of the info displayed). There's no way to make this usable unless you lower the amount of info displayed, but then it will loose its "cool" factor.

naikrovek• 9 years ago

A good designer, paid to do so, could create very cool and useful UIs, I am sure.

Ultimately, it will depend on your own definition of "cool" and "useful" as to how well any one UI suits those labels.

martin_ky• 9 years ago

Exactly. These fictional UIs are designed for a single end - to look good on camera. I think there is an inverse correlation between "cool" and "useful" - the "cool" often distracts from the "useful". While this kind of UI could work for something trivial like a simple calculator or alarm clock, in my experience it does not work for serious applications. As works of art however, these things are a beauty to look at - http://sciencefictioninterfaces.tumblr.com/

I had this idea first back when I saw Star Trek The Next Generation and its slick flat computer panels, called "okudagrams" after their designer, Michael Okuda - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS. I tried to reproduce the look in a note-taking application. It didn't work. The UI was dominated by these large colored buttons and arches, with too much contrast against the black background, leaving too little room for the actual content.

kwekly• 9 years ago

I work in the control room for an electrical generation system an this isn't the case at all for us.

Each desk has 12 ~30 inch monitors, and each monitor has a similar degree of information density, from monitors of system frequency, voltages, power flows etc. around the network, also financial / market information. There's a mix of diagrams, tabular data, maps, plots.

Two of the monitors are devoted to a geographic view with weather data, locations of field staff etc. Check out the similar setup from this California control room: https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2016/06/17/calif...

Most displays show live data, but are not setup to be interacted with normally.

I think the truth is probably due to: 1) the same with all enterprise software, the folks who end up using the displays have token-to-no input into the purchasing or design decisions. Actually now I think of it, check out the interfaces marketed to electronic music composers (generally individuals or small studios): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOq8R55xMyo

2) While I bet operators would select Tronish UI given the choice, they don't _need_ it because ultimately (with enough experience) the model of the system sits in your head, and the interface simply gives cues.

laumars• 9 years ago

To be honest that looks like your typical sysadmins interface. A tiling window manager and/or few tmux sessions and you quickly end up with the same level of information density.

vcjohnson• 9 years ago

I used the gnome theme for the movie Live Free or Die Hard on linux back in 2008 or so

https://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Die+Hard+4.0+-+M...

for reference this is what it looked like in the movie:

https://nmap.org/movies/diehard4/nmap-diehard4-crop-600x300....

th0ma5• 9 years ago

They used Processing some I think in the movie which now has a WebGL version.

fizixer• 9 years ago

You could add a video stream from a live online news channel on the top right? (on my side the top right was pretty much empty)

samstave• 9 years ago

GitHub top right was full of github user avatars

samgranieri• 9 years ago

Holy shit! This is amazing. Great job

emilioolivares• 9 years ago

What, the .js file for the globe itself is 43 thousand lines of code. Was this a weekend project? How do you find the time? Very well done my friend. (https://github.com/arscan/encom-globe/blob/master/build/enco...)

arscan8• 9 years ago

I used browserify to bundle in Three.js and all the other dependencies. Yes, it's an embarrassingly large JS package. There are probably better ways of doing this, but being a weekend project I decided that it wasn't worth my time to investigate ;-)

If you look at the commits, I just tried to push a few lines of code every day (nights, weekends) over the course of a couple of months. It adds up.

unkown-unknowns• 9 years ago

I am quite stupid, I always thought that when people on HN talked about their weekend projects they meant something that they'd made in a single weekend. Only now upon reading your comment do I realize that it means something one is working on over any number of weekends. I've been on HN for about 7 years :/

All this time I've been wondering why it takes me weeks of weekends to complete what others do in a single weekend even though I regard myself as highly competent at both software engineering and programming. Then it turns out I had simply misunderstood the meaning of "weekend project".

Oh and also, very nice project, kudos.

metmac• 9 years ago

So cool to see this revived. I remember stumbling upon it awhile back.

cjsuk• 9 years ago

You got in :)

Splines• 9 years ago

Subreddit of movie-fake-UI: https://www.reddit.com/r/FUI/

baalimago• 9 years ago

I've not even seen tron since im too young... but all i can say is that i'm mighty impressed

mixmastamyk• 9 years ago

The legacy film came out in 2010 or so.

ninju• 9 years ago

The original TRON movie came out in 1982 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/

In 2010 there was a sequel movie Tron: Legacy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/

Kenji• 9 years ago

The funny thing is that it loads faster and has higher fps than many websites that display simple blogposts and a couple of images, but pull in literally megabytes of JavaScript and other bloat.

People, learn from this. Seriously. The web doesn't have to be slow if you put effort into it.

kang• 9 years ago

Reminded me of top unixporn post https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2sz5xo/bspwmofxoc...

hobarrera• 9 years ago

It _looks_ really cool, but I feel that with all the extra bells and whistles taking up so much screen estate, I'd need a 50" monitor on my desk just to actually _use_ ~27".

nautilus12• 9 years ago

If only we could get a version of this to render in the terminal so we could hack our workstations to actually look like this. I use tmux pretty heavily. Id love it if panes looked like this

cdevs• 9 years ago

I love this.

collinmanderson• 9 years ago

Fun to see Event Source show up here. I feel like WebSockets are all the craze, but Event Source seems to be a really simple alternative that uses only HTTP.

arscan8• 9 years ago

Yes! I started with WebSockets, but Event Source met my needs and is much simpler.

bluescreenofwin• 9 years ago

Man this brings me back.. Thank you for creating this!

hughw• 9 years ago

My admiration is unbound. I have one reservation -- I wish it would handle history correctly. I wish each click e.g. github produced a new URL I could email to a friend so they could view the same scene. And then I wish I could hit "back" to recover the landing page. None of this diminishes how beautiful this is, and I'm sure it just wasn't part of what you were trying to explore.

arscan8• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I'll definitely add that if I take the time to add more features.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Check out Harvard's economic globe.[1] This looks like the globe from this demo, but it's a real interactive tool.

[1] http://globe.cid.harvard.edu/?mode=gridSphere&id=PH

Shinchy• 9 years ago

This is fantastic, really fun to use and would make a cool portfolio website.

luord• 9 years ago

Man, fantastic.

I should probably get into doing something like this in my free time instead of browsing reddit or tvtropes.

HTML5 Version of the Tron:Legacy Boardroom Scene

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