Reimagining Terminator 2: What a T-800s interface looks like today

Reimagining Terminator 2: What a T-800s interface looks like today

Hillary Lewis February 1, 2024

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If you're a big fan of the Terminator series you'll probably recognize this clip

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And this one

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If you do, you probably know that these scenes from Terminator 2: Judgment Day were iconic in setting an example of futuristic interface design for the film industry in the early 90s.

The first cyborg, the T-800, could scan and analyze people, objects, and data all within his red-tinted heads-up display, or HUD. And although these scenes above might look primitive in today's world, it inspired countless TV and film creators to dream up futuristic designs in the hope their impossible tech would one day become a reality. Tech companies and creators alike have even built their own heads-up display (HUD) tech together, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

Fast-forward 27 years and that inspiration was not lost on creators and designers from Adobe and Territory Studios. To celebrate the 27th anniversary of the original film's release, they partnered up to reimagine what a T-800's HUD might look like in 2018.

To do this, it was only fitting they chose to use one of Adobe's newest tech crafted for high fidelity UX/UI design work: Adobe XD.

Marti Romances, Creative Director and Co-founder of Territory Studios, and his team have produced countless screen interface design for major blockbusters such as Avengers: Infinity War, Ready Player One, and Blade Runner 2049, and they were up for the challenge of redesigning these two iconic scenes with the help of Talin Wadsworth, Adobe XD's Senior UX Design Lead.

Marti Romances, left; Talin Wadsworth, right

These are the innovative re-works they came up with

Achieving something that looks straight out of Iron Man's helmet isn't a simple task, especially when throwing a completely new software into the works.

I sat down with Marti and Talin to talk about the process and adaptations of using a workflow with Adobe XD, how they tackled redesigning the two stills above, and how each of them personally view the connection between movies and tech.

You can also watch Adobe's Behind the Scenes of this project and download the full Adobe XD UI kit on Adobe's blog.

Creative COW: Why was this collaboration formed and what were your underlying hopes for the project?

TALIN WADSWORTH: Being a creator of tools, it was about imagining what's possible and being inspired by sci-fi and movies to really push the limits of [Adobe] XD. XD is a new tool for UX and UI design, so it's a chance to work with Marti and the team who are visionaries using film and movies to imagine what the future looks like. So it's just a great opportunity to go back and pull from our influences of the past and imagine where we're going, especially with AR and VR industries exploding in the platform. And being able to reimagine major film touchstones of the past using a new tool from Adobe was an opportunity I don't think we could pass up.

What was the creative process from conception to delivery and how did Territory and Adobe work together?

MARTI ROMANCES: It was a good experiment. Most of those tools are part of the Adobe Suite, so we have the ability to learn a new tool inside of that group of software we use every day. We discovered very quickly how that taps into our pipeline that we are used to. It really helped us save some time and approach different factors of our design process from a different angle, and that's very important for us when we're going over 500 shots. So optimizing our pipeline is great.

Also the fact that Adobe XD focuses on interactivity and user experience helped with interactive pieces that we do on set for films. That was a great surprise to us seeing what the software is capable of doing, which is fairly new, and knowing there s more stuff coming and we get the opportunity to jump into it in its infancy It got us pretty excited. And these guys push for more tools within the software that will end up helping us further in our process. It was really priceless for us.

TALIN: Yeah, what was most exciting for me was that they were actually surprised and excited about getting more than they expected in XD natively. They came from using Illustrator and After Effects and initially it seemed like they were going to use a lot more of Illustrator in the process, but actually found they could do a lot of their high fidelity design work in XD. It's not an element of XD that has been really showcased yet.

MARTI: And the fact that XD works in a non-destructive mode, vector based, for us is extremely important. We need it to be crisp and clear and we could do what we did in Illustrator inside of XD. You have control over all of your designs just by iterating on your control panel or your widgets. It was one of those moments when you realize the amount of time you can save when doing changes to the entire set properties.

TALIN: That's definitely a goal of XD is to optimize those workflows that we know and love from Illustrator and making them better and more seamless and allow the designers to think ab

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