There’s a lot of high-tech stuff going on in the recent Avengers movie, but perhaps even more interesting is the glimpse we get inito the future of computing through those user interfaces.

We’ve seen the inside of Iron Man’s helmet before, showing us the heads-up display that Robert Downey Jr. uses to monitor the status of his suit and to target all the bad guys. There’s a lot of information being flashed at him all at once and you almost get the sense that they represent the evolution of the homescreen widget.

You’ll also notice that a lot of the displays are transparent. That’s already happening, to a certain extent, by Samsung and other companies. And again, we get those fancy blinking widgets again. You might also remember the scene where a window can be “swiped” over from one workstation to the next.

There is a lot of detail going on with these user interfaces. You can thank freelance visual artist Jayse Hansen, who was responsible for that work in The Avengers. It does make me wonder if these UIs are closer in scope to the future of Windows, Apple, or something else entirely.

I also wonder if the menu at the shawarma place is going to look like this one day…

[Source]