[squarefoot]

>> Physical UIs can be more intuitive and usable than screens

> A thousand times this.

A million times this, also for safety concerns.

The folks at Space-X are not idiots, and they put shiny touch screens in the Crew Dragon spacecraft also for the press to "ooooh! Look at that, ...just like our cellphones!", but all important controls are also behind real physical buttons and joysticks. A touch screen looks amazing and so futuristic, until the moment something hits it in the wrong spot and they lose all instrumentation and controls in one shot. For important stuff I'll always take traditional rugged controls over touch screens.

[jimnotgym]

Yet their colleagues at Tesla did the opposite and put everything on the tablet

[copperx]

> A touch screen looks amazing and so futuristic

Not true. If you examine sci-fi movies from the 1960s onwards, you'll learn that the most futuristic-looking interfaces have the most buttons and physical affordances. Touchscreens were never regarded as futuristic, and thus rarely depicted in sci-fi.

[squarefoot]

That could be because filmmakers didn't know about their existence. SciFi predicts a lot but also borrows from current knowledge; for example, we've seen black holes depicted in different ways according to the knowledge of the time of the writing/filming. Also, for many years before touch screens became reality the only known direct interaction with a screen was like a light pen, whose operation was slow and clumsy (can't "push" more than a "button" at the same time, wires, etc) which could have discouraged the idea suggesting to wait until the idea of operating screens directly using hands was conceived and became popular; probably in ST TNG LCARS interface.

https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/epics/TNG-S4/S4E3/TNG-...

[wyre]

I remember seeing touch screens in sci-fi when the touchscreen is a large table or when the touchscreen is being projected into air.