I was privileged to be a part of an interview with Kent Seki last week. Kent was the visualization and HUD effects supervisor for Iron Man, and our conversation with him was one of the most interesting and inspiring I've had for a long time. The full interview along with a few clips of the audio and some other cool stuff is up on the User Interface Resource Center, who arranged and sponsored the interview.

In the interview Kent talks about what it was like to work with director Jon Faverau and Robert Downey Jr. who, for anyone who's been living under a rock, stars as Tony Stark / Iron Man. Kent also walked us through the entire creative process behind designing some of the more complex visualizations in the movie, including the HUD display projected onto Downey's face several times during the film to give an "in mask" view. Kent explains how the different design elements combined to help tell the story in a deep and profound way.

I was a huge fan of this movie, but couldn't put my finger on what sold the whole experience so well. As Kent described the different interfaces, I realized how huge a part they'd played. The fact that I didn't notice half of the effects while they were happening is a testament to the skill of Kent's team - they managed to make an extremely interactive and complex set of interfaces look so intuitive and seamless that I took them for granted.

I think there are a myriad of lessons to be learned from Iron Man. The obvious ones are designing simple and intuitive interfaces, but beyond this Iron Man should serve as an inspiration of what could be done for all of us involved in the interface design and development field. Like Minority Report in 2002, Iron Man sets the interface-design bar even higher, and is something we'll be talking about for a while.

Kent's team consisted of the Pixel Liberation Front and The Orphanage, and he repeatedly passed all of the credit on to his team during the interview. I want to point it out because it was important to Kent that the Iron Man visualization story focus too much on him, even though he was the one telling it. He's an incredibly humble guy.

Enough said - go check out the interview. :)