Monthly Archives: January 2015

Communications with Sally

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While Vika and Jack are conducting their missions on the ground, Sally is their main point of contact in orbital TET command. Vika and Sally communicate through a video feed located in the top left corner of the TETVision screen. There is no camera visible in the film, but it is made obvious that Sally can see Vika and at one point Jack as well.

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The controls for the communications feed are located in the bottom left corner of the TETVision screen. There are only two controls, one for command and one for Jack. The interaction is pretty standard—tap to enable, tap again to disable. It can be assumed that conferencing is possible, although certain scenes in the film indicate that this has never taken place. Continue reading →

Hydro-rig Monitoring

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As a part of their morning routine, Jack makes the rounds in his Bubbleship to provide a visual confirmation that the hydro-rigs are operating properly. In order to send the hydro-rig coordinates to the Bubbleship, Vika:

  1. Holds with two fingers on the hydro-rig symbol on the left-hand side panel of the TETVision feed
  2. A summary of coordinates is displayed around the touchpoint (hydro-rig symbol)
  3. Drags the data up to the Bubbleship symbol on the side panel

Inconsistent interactions

When Vika sends the drone coordinates, she interacts directly with the map and uses only one finger. Why is the interaction for sending hydro-rig coordinates different than the interaction for sending drone coordinates? Continue reading →

Drone Status Feed

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Oblivion-Desktop-Overview-002 Oblivion-Desktop-DroneMonitor-001

As Vika is looking at the radar and verifying visuals on the dispatched drones with Jack, the symbols for drones 166 and 172 begin flashing red. An alert begins sounding, indicating that the two drones are down.

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Vika wants to send Jack to drone 166 first. To do this she sends Jack the drone coordinates by pressing and holding the drone symbol for 166 at which time data coordinates are displayed. She then drags the data coordinates with one finger to the Bubbleship symbol and releases. The coordinates immediately display on Jack’s HUD as a target area showing the direction he needs to go. Continue reading →

Vika’s Desktop

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As Jack begins his preflight check in the Bubbleship, Vika touches the center of the glass surface to power up the desktop that keeps her in contact with Sally on the TET and allows her to assist and monitor Jack as he repairs the drones on the ground.

The interface components

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Continue reading →

Bubbleship Comms

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Jack communicates with Vika via the HUD in the Bubbleship, and a small earbud that provides two-way audio.

He talks normally to Vika, who responds in kind. There is no visible confirmation of his connection to Vika, and no obvious way for him to send information back other than the sound of his voice.

As shown during the lightning strike sequence, Jack’s earbud is connected directly to the Bubbleship. All of his audio and telemetry requires the Bubbleship to connect with Vika’s control tower. When the Bubbleship’s power goes out, Jack’s communication is cut too. Continue reading →

The Bubbleship Cockpit

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image01 Jack’s main vehicle in the post-war Earth is the Bubbleship craft. It is a two seat combination of helicopter and light jet. The center joystick controls most flight controls, while a left-hand throttle takes the place of a helicopter’s thrust selector. A series of switches above Jack’s seat provide basic power and start-up commands to the Bubbleship’s systems. image05 Jack first provides voice authentication to the Bubbleship (the same code used to confirm his identity to the Drones), then he moves to activate the switches above his head. Continue reading →

Introducing Aleatha Singleton

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Hi there. Tell us a bit about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, how do you spend your time?

Hi. I’m Aleatha Singleton, hailing from Houston, Texas. I’ve been a UX Designer for over 15 years. I enjoy solving problems and making things that are easy and fun to use whether they’re digital or analog.

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When I’m not at work, I like to read, study the Japanese culture, and teach myself new things such as designing and building furniture or making udon noodles from scratch.

I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi interfaces and technology, especially when the concepts become reality. It’s always fun and exciting to see how ideas that seemed so impossible only a couple of decades ago are being prototyped and developed in labs around the world, such as holodecks, 3D volumetric interfaces, neural scanners, etc., etc.

In the future, I would like to be a part of cutting edge innovation and ideation—thinking about how technology could improve lives—and then build it and make it real.

What are some of your favorite sci-fi interfaces (Other than in Oblivion)? (And, of course, why?)

Continue reading →

Home 49

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Home 49 is a connected system that provides for the daily needs of Jack and Vika. It handles everything from morning breakfast, to video storage of previous missions, to maintenance of drones, to Jack’s personal weapons. The Home acts as both a residence and a watchtower, and is built on a slim stilt that reaches from ground level to above the cloud layer. This isolates Home 49 from the ground.

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Inside, the home pod is broken down into ‘functional’ spaces. These include the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, armory, and maintenance shop. It is connected to the exterior doors, windows, observation platform, landing pad, and pool.

The entire facility is a prefabricated structure (or at least a set-plan concept), and we see a nearly identical facility in Area 52. Cosmetic differences and changes to color scheme suggest a modicum of customization for each instance of the team.

The Breakfast console interface is multimodal, changing as Vika’s tasks change. Its contents are heavily mediated by Sally is an intermediary agent during most of Vika’s console tasks, though her perspective and information seems limited to that received from the drones or from Vika.

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The Breakfast console seems to scale with the task, and is capable of highlighting particular subtasks in progress, while displaying a wealth of peripheral or supplemental data. Continue reading →

The Oblivion will be nerdsourced

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The review of Oblivion will not go down as almost all of the others have, i.e., as a single author working his way through all interfaces in a given film. This review is distributed amongst several authors. How did this come about?

In April of 2014 I posted a call for readers of the site to band together to make reviewing a movie a little less onerous along with a poll to see which movie we should review. That movie is Oblivion, and the reviews will be going live over the next weeks.

Since this review will involve multiple people, keep an eye on the site for biography posts introducing each of the new authors before their first post goes live. Maybe you’ll be inspired to join the next “nerdsourcing” experiment.