Iron Man HUD part 2

The first Iron Man would have been a hard act to follow, but the team behind Iron Man 2 have done a stellar job with the design in the film. As with the first film, it is rich with beautifully designed huds, surface interfaces, interactive holograms and is full of cool ideas.

It was great to see the design style carried on through from the first film. I really love the world created in the Iron Man movies, and how Tony Stark's life is surrounded by intuitive interfaces. His house for example, has its own computer system, where every surface seems to be interactive, from his coffee table to his bedroom windows, which he can even use as a mirror via a camera. His workshop though has to be the most advanced room in the house, and it's where the most exciting interface sequence takes place.

The map sequence must be one of my favourite sequences in both the Iron Man films. It shows Tony scanning a 'digital wireframe' of a miniature model and creating a 'manipulatable projection' that he interacts with in incredible ways. It's an amazing way of visualizing and manipulating information, which seems to be a much more enjoyable and intuitive experience than studying or prototyping on a computer screen. It was really beautiful when the holograms expanded to fill the space around him, just imagine how this could be applied to installations and the immersive experiences you could create with this. Equally ingenious is how Tony is able to collapse all that data into a ping pong ball-sized cluster. It would be incredible to have an interface that could be projected into physical spaces, which you could just put in your pocket and take anywhere. I hope someone invents a way to do something like this soon.

Watch the Iron Man 2 map sequence
Check out the Iron Man 2 HUDs
Check out the Iron Man 2 surface interfaces