To equip Barbarella for her perilous task, Dianthus sends her things using the atom transmitter. The device looks like a glowing table with a plastic dome sealing the top. One section of the dome is hinged on one side so it can be lifted and set back into place. The sender places the item to send on the surface and lowers the lid. The table glows brightly and the object disappears.

A “boing” noise repeats while the item is in transit. The person receiving enters a shared three digit number into her machine. (Dianthus has her set her “personal atom transmitter to 0-3-5.”) The receiving table begins to glow brightly. The transmitted item appears, the “boing” noise stops, and the table dims.

In this way Dianthus equips Barbarella with weapons and a means to identify Durand-Durand.

Let’s bypass the whole question of whether teleportation is possible. The key information a sender must provide is which matter is to be sent and when to send it. People are generally pretty good at simple physics, so using a physical space with a tangible interface to provide both sets of information is going to be pretty usable. This is also at a very comfortable height for placing and viewing objects.

The device, in turn, needs to communicate when it is in progress and when it is done. If Make It So has taught us nothing else, it’s that technology glows, so using light to communicate this state also makes quite a bit of sense. Using a transparent material lets the user see the progress and visually confirm that yep, it’s been sent.

The receiver needs to know when something is being sent to her and the ability to retrieve it. Having those things be similar to the sender’s device makes it easy to learn, once, and to infer use from watching the sender.

There are all sorts of exception case questions that would need to be answered for a complete design of such a system, but for the basic interaction of atom transferrance, this is a pretty awesome design.