Diegetic UI vs FUI (Fantasy User Interface)
ダイエジェティックUI / 架空ユーザーインターフェース
Neither can actually be used, and in both, thin glowing lines and floating panels stand in for information.
How to tell them apart. If it is equipment a character holds or an object inside the world, it is Diegetic UI. A screen that exists only for the audience to read is FUI.
Diegetic UI
A name for the corner of game interface design where an element belongs both to the fiction and to the three dimensional world. A 2009 master's thesis at Chalmers University of Technology, written with EA DICE, mapped game UI on those two axes and reserved the word for that corner. Health glowing on the hero's own suit is the type case.
FUI (Fantasy User Interface)
The name that stuck to the craft of making the screens that appear inside films. It spread around the work of Mark Coleran, who says he is given credit for the term without being sure he can take it, and who describes these screens as illustration and a storytelling device that was never designed to be used. He works with light, shape, form, movement and sound so that each film screen has one thing the audience is meant to read.
| Diegetic UI | FUI (Fantasy User Interface) | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2009– | 1997– |
| Family | UI Expression | UI Expression |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Health or ammunition shown on the protagonist's own equipment instead of in a corner of the screen / A map the character holds up and reads while still walking, rather than a paused overlay / Panels of information projected into the air that tilt with the camera because they occupy the space / Directions given by the color of a signpost standing in the world itself | One thing per screen that the audience is meant to read, with everything else present as density / Columns of monospaced figures updating continuously while computing nothing / Thin luminous lines on black, with shapes drawn as outlines and almost no fill / Frames and controls that look like plausible equipment rather than pure abstraction |
| Best used for | Moving health and ammunition out of the corners of a first person game and into the world itself · Placing information in VR or in a vehicle as an object in space rather than a layer stuck to the view | Designing a screen that has to be read in the few seconds an actor is looking at it · Designing the display of a device that does not exist, as a picture that never has to work |
| Type | Treat every character as printed or projected onto something in the world, so it skews with the camera. Some angles will be unreadable, so carry the same meaning in shape and color too. | Lead with monospace and let most of the text act as texture. Only the word that must be read changes size and brightness. |
| Composition | Leave the four corners of the screen empty. Distribute information across the body, the held device, and the environment, and keep those roles fixed. | Decide the one thing to be read first and aim the light and the motion at it. Fill the rest with density that carries no meaning. |
| Material | Use only materials the fiction can account for, such as a lit tube or a projected plane. The style collapses when the material stops being explainable, so settle the world first. | One or two luminous colours on black, thin strokes, almost no fill. Pull the brightness down so the screen sits inside the photographed shot. |
| Caution | Building an object into the world and then printing controller button names on it mixes fiction with rules, and that is exactly where the thesis's own focus group reported the illusion breaking. | Trying to make the screen genuinely operable thins out the density and scatters the information, and it stops being readable in the length of the performance. |