Monthly Archives: January 2013

Alien head sterilizer

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In the lab, Shaw and Ford investigate the alien head from the complex. They first seek to sterilize it. Though we don’t see how the process is initiated, after it is, a “dumb waiter” raises the head from some storage space to a glass-walled chamber where it is sprayed with some white mist. A screen displays an animation of waves passing along the surface of the head.

When the mist clears, a screen reads “SAMPLE STERILE. NO CONTAGION PRESENT,” which Ford dutifully repeats even though Shaw has a screen that says the exact same thing. Obscure metrics and graphs fill the edges of the screen.

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It might have been tempting for the designers to simply supply the analysis, i.e., “no contagion,” but by providing the data from which the analysis derives, the scientists can check and verify the data for themselves, so the combination is well considered.

There are several problems with this sterilization system.

The text of the analysis reads well and unambiguously, but the graphics would be more informative if they indicated their values within clear ranges. As they are, they push the burden of understanding the context of the values onto the scientists’ memories. If this was a very commonplace activity, this might not be much of an issue.

More importantly are the problems with the industrial design. First, this device seems surprisingly head-sized. Wouldn’t a crewmember be the most likely thing they’d have to sterilize? Shouldn’t it be bigger? But moreover, this device is in the wrong place on the ship. If it was infected with an alien pathogen, sterilizing it here is already too late. The pathogen has already spread everywhere between the airlock, the storage space, and on the hands of whoever had to move it between. It would be better if possibly unsterile material could be loaded into a decontamination system outside the ship, and then only once sterilized then pass through to the interior.

Injection radiocarbon dater

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Shaw uses a handheld device to perform a real-time carbon dating on an alien cadaver. This device is a cylinder with thick-gauged needle. White rings around the base and a big button on its side indicate power. When pressed into the alien tissue, the date appears on a small screen along its side along with four beeps. Shaw then turns it off with the press of the button.

Though the device has a very little screen time, it seems simple to use, suited to purpose, and with nothing extraneous. A simple device that as far as we see is well done.

Topography “Pups”

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The “pups,” as low-grade sociopath and geologist Fifield calls them, are a set of spheres that float around and spatially map the surface contours of a given space in real-time.

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To activate them, Fifield twists their hemispheres 90 degrees along their equator, and they begin to glow red along two red rings.

When held up for a few seconds, they rise to the vertical center of the space they are in, and begin to fly in different directions, shining laser in a coronal ring as they go.

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In this way they scan the space and report what they detect of the internal topography back to the ship, where it is reconstructed in 3D in real time. The resulting volumetric map features not just the topography, but icons (yellow rotating diamonds with last initials above them) to represent the locations of individual scientists and of course the pups themselves.

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The pups continue forward along the axis of a space until they find a door, at which they will wait until they are let inside. How they recognize doors in alien architecture is a mystery. But they must, or the first simple dead-end or burrow would render it inert.

The pups are simple, and for that they’re pretty cool. Activation by twist-and-lift is easy through the constraints of the environment suits, easy to remember, and quick to execute, but deliberate enough not to be performed accidentally. Unfortunately we never see how they are retreived, but it raises some interesting interaction design challenges.