Apple’s design principles make it into all sorts of areas of pop culture — from the robots in Pixar’s Wall*E to the Stormtroopers and lightsabers in the Disney Star Wars movies to… Iron Man’s head-up display (HUD)?
According to a new oral history of Tony Stark’s instantly recognizable HUD, the computer interface’s design was greatly influenced by Apple’s then-brand new handset, which had only just shipped when the first Iron Man movie was in production.
“I remember in an early discussion in post-production with [Iron Man director] Jon Favreau,” HUD effects supervisor Kent Seki told VFXBlog. “He pulled out his iPhone, which was a new thing at the time. He said, ‘I don’t want to tell you a specific graphic to make for the HUD, but I want it to feel intuitive like my iPhone.”
HUD design supervisor Dav Rauch echoed the origin story:
“The iPhone had just come out like literally a week or two before the meeting with Jon – and I got an iPhone and Favreau had gotten an iPhone. When I was down there we kind of geeked out on our iPhones, and we were talking about what we liked about the iPhone because he was really inspired by it. He was like, ‘What I love about this thing is it just kind of does what it should do, and it kind of does what I want it to do and it’s very intuitive and it’s very simple.’ We opened it up and I was looking at the transitions in an iPhone. I’m like, ‘These transitions are so simple and they’re just like zooming transitions, or wipe transitions. There’s nothing fancy about this phone, but what’s fancy about this phone is that it works and it works really well.’”
It’s a neat reminder of just how transformative the original iPhone design was. Interestingly, Iron Man also includes J.A.R.V.I.S, Tony Stark’s smart assistant virtual butler, who pre-dates Apple’s Siri by several years (although reflects a much older Apple vision for the so-called Knowledge Navigator.)
Either way, we’re just happy to know that director Jon Favreau is a fellow Apple geek!
If you’re a fan of Iron Man, we’d highly recommend reading the entire HUD oral history article, which is packed full of interesting tidbits. We’ve included the link below.
Source: VFXBlog
