Film taught everyone what holographic interfaces look like: floating panes, rotating wireframe planets, hands conducting data like an orchestra. Almost none of it survives contact with a real user, because movie UIs are optimized to be filmed, not used.
The failures are predictable. Mid-air panels have no resting position, so arms tire in minutes. Transparent text over moving backgrounds is unreadable at real sizes. Gesture-everything input lacks the precision of a pointer and the ergonomics of a keyboard. Fiction can cut away before fatigue sets in; production cannot.
What does survive is the visual language stripped to its useful core: depth layering to communicate hierarchy, glow to communicate interactivity and state, translucency to keep context visible behind focus. Holovate's world HUD is exactly that residue — dark translucent panels floating over a live 3D scene, emissive accents marking what can be acted on, and completely conventional buttons and text doing the actual work.
The craft is knowing which half of the fiction to keep. Borrow the light and the layering; refuse the floating keyboards. Users want interfaces that look like the future and behave like the present.
Judge the balance yourself in the frontier world.