The Future User Interface

FUIs, Future User Interfaces, influence the design of every device we interact with, yet it’s a niche within the design world. Film is the main vector for these incredible design pieces, though the gaming industry has a part to play too. This is part one of a series where I’ll explore the origins, elements, and influences of FUIs on and off screen, so strap in, this should be fun :) 

What the FUI?

You’ve all seen them. James Bond peers over a touch screen that displays intricate plans for his next mission. Jack Reacher analyses surveillance footage with impossible precision, Lex in Jurassic Park taps away at a Unix system to save the day. In essence they're interfaces that look and feel futuristic, designed not for realism, but for narrative and visual impact. Exposition is delivered as our protagonists are lit by the glow of the screens. Data flies, decisions are made, and our heroes execute their mission, but while FUIs feel futuristic, their origins on screen go back over one hundred years. 

Art imitates life. FUIs imitate radars. 

In 1935 Scottish radio engineer Robert Watson-Watt and his team added a screen to their fledgling radar system; a simple electron sweep across a phosphor-coated screen to show reflected signals. This was cutting edge. The glowing, oscilloscope-esque line combined with the knobs and switches surrounding it wasn’t aping the future, it was the future. The form of the interface was a direct by-product of its function, and when that form is complex and its function borderline magical, it imprints itself on our imagination.

Radar technology and the interfaces driving them improved at breakneck speed and by the 1970s we had systems like the LRP4 where data density had increased fifty-fold. The dimness of the CRT screens necessitated the radar be used in dark environments, and so additional backlights were added to the text labelling switch inputs.

These advances served to progressively upgrade our mental blueprint of the technical interface to the point where today no self respecting FUI is complete without a radar or radar-adjacent visual. 

The Wireframe

While Robert Watson-Watt pioneered the visual radar in 1935, the seeds of another FUI mainstay had been sown a full thirty three years earlier. In the frankly bonkers silent film, A Trip to the Moon, we can spot the unmistakable drawing of a wireframe sphere chalked up on a mad scientist's board, and in this one scene the visual language of implied technicality is birthed. 

Jump forward to 1968, and 2001: A Space Odyssey featured the first rotating wireframe seen on screen. This was achieved not through computers, but by rotoscoping over footage of a handmade physical model, a curiously analogue approach used to simulate digital complexity, and a sign of how ubiquitous the aesthetic had already become.

The first fully computer-generated 3D animated wireframe appeared in the 1976 film Futureworld. It was created by a young Ed Catmull who used his own hand as the basis for the shot. That short sequence was a technological milestone, and Catmull would later co-found Pixar.

But why does the wireframe feel so intrinsically futuristic?

One answer lies in its rarity. Wireframes are almost never used in everyday consumer interfaces. Instead, they're the domain of engineers, CAD technicians, prototypes: as with radars, tools built for functionality over form. Ironically, this minimalism feels more advanced. The absence of polish suggests systems that haven't yet been packaged for public use, hinting at raw, under-the-hood power.

The transparency also implies mastery. A wireframe interface suggests that the user doesn’t need visual crutches like texture, shading, or skeuomorphism. They understand the system so intimately that a mesh of lines is enough. In this way, wireframes become shorthand for expertise and for technology operating ahead of its time.

Today, wireframes are a staple of FUIs across film, games, and speculative design. They have become visual code for the future: abstract, elegant, and strangely believable. Whether projected in mid air, embedded in a helmet HUD, or scrolling across a spaceship console, wireframes continue to signal that what we're seeing is not just fictional, but advanced.

And despite their age, they show no sign of leaving the screen anytime soon.