The Groomer

23 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The groomer is a device for sale at the Wookie Planet Trading Post C by local proprietor Saun Dann. (It was named long before the evil pederast sense came to common use.) It looks like a dust brush with an OXO designed, black, easy-grip handle, with a handful of small silver pushbuttons on one side (maybe…three?), and a handful of black buttons on the other (again, maybe three). It’s kind of hard to call it exactly, since this is lower-res than a recompressed I Can Haz Cheezburger jpg.

Let’s hear Saun describe it to the vaguely menacing Imperial shopper in his store.

Besides shaving and hair trimming, it’s guaranteed to lift stains off clothing, faces, and hands. Cleans teeth, fingers and toenails, washes eyes, pierces ears, calculates, modulates, syncopates life rhythms, and can repeat the Imperial Penal Code—all 17 volumes— in half the time of the old XP-21. Just the thing to keep you squeaky clean.

There are so many, many problems with this thing. On every level it’s wretched.

A character in a black helmet holds a futuristic device while interacting with an elderly man in a casual outfit, set in a brightly colored interior.

A man in a dark helmet stands next to another man holding a small object, likely a weapon, while surrounded by a colorful, cluttered backdrop.

There are lots of product definition problems, of course, (e.g. worse feature bloat than iTunes) but these are issues for scifiproductdesign.com.

And there’s way too much ambiguity in the description, too. For instance, does it (calculate like a calculator), (modulate like a scientific calculator) and (syncopate life rhythms like a metronome)? Or does it (calculate life rhythms) and (modulate life rhythms) and (syncopate life rhythms)? What would any of that mean? Filed for scifiproductmanuals.com.

And is the Imperial Code thing supposed to be a joke? At first you think it’s a dig at this cog of the executive branch for some oppressive legislation enacted by the fascist political regime that gave him his license to menace, haha classic Saun Dann, but then he follows it with an actual performance metric comparison to a prior product version, which is named by model number. So it’s meant to be real? Scificomedywriting.com is still up for grabs, variety show writers from the 70s.

But for the interface questions…where to begin? How do the paucity of controls map to functions? Why are they undifferentiated? Where are the shaving bits? Why are the push controls covering the grip handle?

Which takes us to the darkest aspect of the product: as a single throwaway mention, hidden amongst distraction text, Saun says that it can pierce. Note that with the very poorly placed controls, there are no easy gaurds against accidental activation. It’s almost like it was meant to be a terribly designed, dangerous thing, as liable to leave a gaping hole in your tongue as prepare you for a visit to a dentist.

Because of its terrible industrial design, pointless features, and lawsuit-ready interface, I posit that this object is not something Saun has out to sell to beloved Wookie regulars. It’s something like a Chinese Finger Trap. Cruel shoes. A violent-joke product, only to be brought out when Imperial shoppers patronize the store, in the hopes that they would waste their time on pseudoscience, be forced to confront their own bureaucracy, and ultimately, accidentally pierce themselves in unspeakable places.

Way to subvert, shopkeep.

Rebel videoscope

23 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Talking to Luke

Hidden behind a bookshelf console is the family’s other comm device. When they first use it in the show, Malla and Itchy have a quick discussion and approach the console and slide two panels aside.

The device is small and rectangular, like an oscilloscope, sitting on a shelf about eye level. It has a small, palm sized color cathode ray tube on the left. On the right is an LED display strip and an array of red buttons over an array of yellow buttons. Along the bottom are two dials.

Without any other interaction, the screen goes from static to a direct connection to a hangar where Luke Skywalker is working with R2-D2 to repair some mechanical part. He simply looks up to the camera, sees Malla and Itchy, and starts talking. He does nothing to accept the call or end it. Neither do they.

We also see the conversation from Luke’s perspective as well. It’s even more oscillioscopey, with lots of dials, switches, and sliders to either side.

So this all might be intriguing (and right in line with agentive design) but before we start to investigate, we need to look at another instance of its use. Just like the Imperial-issie Media Console, this functions differently later in the same show.

Talking to Leia

After Itchy’s SFW living room masturbation chair sequence, the camera cuts to Leia and C-3PO in an unspecified office somewhere. The droid works at a console for a moment and finally turns a dial. In the Wookie household, a loud dee-DEEP dee-DEEP sounds until Malla rushes to the console, and slides the panels aside. C-3PO sees Malla’s face, and turns to Leia saying, “Ah. I have made the connection. You may speak now if you wish.”

They do, and when the conversation is over, the feed just shuts off, with neither party doing anything to make it happen.

So. Yeaaaaah.

Activation

How is it turned on? One possibility is an architectural switch activated by sliding the panels. It would be a good design decision, as it is an action that needs to be undertaken anyway to use it. But that doesn’t explain Luke’s use.

Connection

How does Malla’s device know to call Luke once it’s on? It could be that it’s a fixed connection, like an intercom, that only calls that one other device. But it’s a Rebel garage. That doesn’t make sense. Why would Malla need to only call there? And of course they receive a call from Leia, who isn’t in that same garage, so it’s not exactly fixed.

Security

The device contains incriminating evidence, i.e. the direct connection to the Rebel base, and so it needs some sort of security. Why is that not in evidence?

Secret agent?

One technological concept that would answer a lot of these questions is that of agentive technology, i.e. artificial narrow intelligence that does things on behalf of its users.

It could explain how the device turns on and (some of) the security: the camera has hairy face recognition and persistently watches for authorized users, turning on when it sees one of them. Conceptually that would be far beyond common sci-fi tropes of the time, but in keeping with the New Criticism stance of the blog, should be considered.

It could explain how it knew to call Luke: It understands Shyriiwook and listened to the conversation that Itchy and Malla had before they opened the panel, knew they wanted to call Luke, and found him in the garage.

It could explain how it turns off: It’s smart enough to understand the linguistic, social, and physical cues that the conversation has ended.

The world of Star Wars even has this technology in evidence. The droids all exhibit artificial general intelligence, and it is only a failure of imagination that this intelligence should not be incorporated into important devices, or spaceships, or architecture.

This would also explain why c-3PO is managing the interface on his end but nobody else has to bother: An AI does not need another AI, just an API.

It would even explain why the damned thing rings. Take a moment to appreciate that. This is an illegal device on the Empire-controlled Kazook. We know this because it’s deliberately hidden, and our protagonists really work to avoid the Empire’s finding it. Yet when an unexpected call comes in, it shrilly announces the fact of itself to everyone within screeching range. The only way this is not the most moronic feature possible of an illegal object is if it can scan the surroundings and verify that it’s OK to ring. Because otherwise, it would be the most stupid feature of a stupidly stupid technology made in haste for a stupid show slopped together in haste and without any respect for a logical or consistent diegesis.

Whew.

Thank The Maker for apologetics.

Imperial-issue Media Console

22 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

When she wonders about Chewbacca’s whereabouts, Malla first turns to the Imperial-issue Media Console. The device sits in the living space, and consists of a personal console and a large wall display. The wall display mirrors the CRT on the console. The console has a QWERTY keyboard, four dials, two gauges, a sliding card reader, a few red and green lights on the side, and a row of randomly-blinking white lights along the front.

Public Service Requests

As Malla approaches it, it is displaying an 8-bit kaleidoscope pattern and playing a standard-issue “electronics” sound. Malla presses a handful of buttons—here it’s important to note the difficulty of knowing what is being pressed when the hand we’re watching is covered in a mop—and then moves through a confusing workflow, where…

She presses five buttons
She waits a few seconds
As she is pressing four more buttons…
…the screen displays a 22-character string (a password? A channel designation?) ↑***3- ↓3&39÷ ↑%63&-:::↓
A screen flashes YOU HAVE REACHED TRAFFIC CONTROL in black letters on a yellow background
She presses a few more buttons, and another 23-character string appears on screen ↑***3- XOXOO OXOOX XOOXO-↑ (Note that the first six characters are identical to the first six characters of the prior code. What’s that mean? And what’s with all the Xs and Os? Kisses and hugs? A binary? I checked. It seems meaningless.)
An op-art psychedelic screen of orange waves on black for a few seconds
A screen flashes NO STARSHIPS IN AREA
Malla punches the air in frustration.

So the first string is, what, a channel? And how do the five buttons she pressed map to that 22 character string? A macro? Why drop to a semi-binary for one command? And are the hugs-and-kisses an instruction? Is that how you write Shyriiwook? Why would it be Latin letters and Unicode characters rather than, say, Aurebesh? Who designed this command language? This orthography? This interface? Maybe it was what this guy was assigned to do after he was relieved of duty.

Video calls

When technology fails to find her sweetheart, Malla turns to her social network. She first uses her Illegal Rebel Comms device to talk to Luke and R2-D2 (next post), and afterwards, returns to the Media Console, which is back to its crappy TSR-80 BASIC-coded screen saver mode.

She taps a few keys (a macro?)
A new code appears: ↑***C- ↓&&&0- 446B°- TP%C↓
The display reads: SUB TERMINAL 4468 (or 446E or maybe 446B. It’s a square font and Malla’s hairy arm is in the way.)
She presses a few more keys
The screen displays STAND BY for a few seconds
Then the word CONNECT flashes a few times
She presses a single button
TRADING POST WOOKIE PLANET C flashes
A live camera feed displays of the trading post

So it’s actually nice to see the first 5 characters of the string be different since this is a different mode: public function (↑***3-) versus video phone (↑***C-). It made me wonder if the codes were some sort of four part IP address, but then I saw the traffic control command is only three lines, so it’s not a consistent enough pattern. So I was hoping to find some secret awesomeness, but no.

Here’s the flow chart as completed by the demoted Stormtrooper designer (translated from the Aurebesh).

Public Addresses

Not only is the interaction terrible, but it’s not really your device anyway. The Empire can take control of these screens for government business, like paging errant Stormtroopers. In these cases, an alarm sounds in the house, and then the Empire Video Feed comes online. No bizarre character strings. No flashing text. No arbitrary key presses.

After all that, an Easy Mode

As if that wasn’t enough, the thing works differently later in the show. After he returns to the tree house, Saun uses the system to call the Imperial Officer to cover Han and Chewie’s murderous tracks with a lie. To make the call, all Saun has to do is insert an identification card, press the same key on the keyboard six times, and with no weird codes or substation identification interstitials, he is connected immediately to the Imperial officer. After the officer terminates their call, Saun presses another button a few times and removes his card. That’s it. It was almost easy.

This tells us that the system can work fairly simply. If you’re calling the Empire. Or if you’re high enough social status and have the card to prove it. This technology just sucks. Maybe this is why the rebellion started.

The holocircus

21 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

To distract Lumpy while she tends to dinner, Malla sits him down at a holotable to watch a circus program. She leans down to one of the four control panels inset around the table’s edge, presses a few buttons, and the program begins.

In the program small volumetric projections of human (not Wookie) performers appear on the surface of the table and begin a dance and acrobatic performance to a soundtrack that is, frankly, ear-curdling.

A furry creature with long, greenish hair stands next to a patterned circular table, looking down with a curious expression.

A person observing a small dancer on a patterned floor, with a plant and furniture visible in the background.

Partway through the performance, Lumpy presses the second-from-the-left button, and the main dancer (who has just got to be a Radical Faerie, a full year before that august organization formed) disappears from the table only to become a life-sized projection just off the table, as if the figure had invisible legs but stood on the floor of the house.

Close-up view of a vintage computer keyboard integrated into a modern device, set against a blurred colorful background.

A close-up of a yellow, fluffy object being placed into a machine, with a blurred background.

When Lumpy is done with the performance, he presses a button, and RF guy disappears from the room and reappears in small size on the table to join the other performers on the table for a bow and curtain call before they all disappear and that ghastly, inhumane music stops.

A close-up of a furry, humanoid creature with a serious expression and large eyes, resembling a character from a science fiction universe.

A green ghostly figure levitates and dances above a table, while a furry creature observes in a room filled with shelves and plants.

So…yeah. This interface.

The terrible usability of tape recorders

It’s pretty clear the control panels are cassette recorders. I know that young readers won’t know what the pfassk that is, so for due diligence, let me explain. Those devices recorded and played back audio stored on magnetic tapes wound in cartridges. The controls for it were six stay-state toggles. These types of buttons have two states. Pushing one locks it down and sets the device to a mode: Play, Rewind, or Fast Forward. One special button, Record (often colored red) had to be chorded with the Play button as a safety precaution against accidentally destroying an existing recording. Users had to press a special Stop button to release any pressed button and stop the mode. Fast forward and Rewind could be pressed while audio was playing, but in such cases they would act as a momentary button. When any of the modes reached the end of a tape, higher-end recorders would also automatically release that button.

So let’s all admit that these are pretty terrible controls. From the fact that they almost all look the same to the fact that toggles make much more sense. (Press one button to play, press that same button again to make it stop.) But toggles weren’t the consumer model of the time. And this holocircus interface, hastily put together from things that the prop department could purchase off the shelf in the one day they were given to hack it together, inherits all that unusability and piles some more confusion onto it.

For instance

When we see Lumpy press the “Make the Dancing Man Bigger” mode, no other buttons are depressed. That means Malla had to set the circus mode, start the program, and press something like a stop button that released those. In turn that means if there was nothing on the table, it could either be because this was a blank spot in the media or that it wasn’t actually playing. You couldn’t tell, though, because the neither the controls nor the media didn’t reflect the state of the thing. This is probably not a common problem because we see that the garish programs and their terrible soundtracks are pretty effing hard to miss, but from a pure usability point of view, it sucks and should be avoided.

Now, there’s probably a thought exercise that could be done to figure out what keys mapped to which functions (and how), as well as second-guess the capabilities of the media (could he have picked any performer to enlarge, or was there just this option?) but honestly, it would be a Sisyphean multithreaded process of single-function vs. combined-letter arguments made by myself in a wall of text with little to no payoff for either of us. Knock yourself out in the comments if you want, but I’d rather focus on another aspect of the interface that I think does pay off, and that’s the visual language of the VP.

You know, for kids

This volumetric projection does not have most of the visual signals common to sci-fi hologram trope:

Edge-lighting
Blue cast
Scan lines
Projection rays

It does have translucency and an unusual scale, but that’s it. This visual language was actually established in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. So its absence here is conspicuous. As I noted in Make It So, these signals make it very clear to the observer that what they are observing is media—i.e. not real. Of course the real reason these VPs lack those signals is because this show had the budget of this blog post, but can we find a diegetic reason?

Surprisingly, I think yes. Kid’s media is different than regular media. Just like we pretend that Santa Claus is real for young children until they’re old enough to start to think critically about it, perhaps special effort is taken on these VPs to make it really immersive for the hairy kiddo. He doesn’t get the it’s-not-real signals because they want him to believe that it is.

Which is some fine holiday apologetics, if I do say so myself.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978): Overview

21 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

A close-up of a young man with light-colored hair and blue eyes, set against a starry outer space background.

A woman with styled hair, wearing a white outfit, gazes thoughtfully while set against a starry background.

This week, to celebrate both the holiday and the release of a new film in the Star Wars universe, we pause the ongoing review to return briefly to the interfaces of an old, wretched entry in this ongoing saga.

Release Date: 17 November 1978 (USA)

Han and Chewbacca are flying back to the Wookie home world Kazook [sic] for Life Day (read: Christmas) but encounter some imperial trouble which delays them. Worried, Chewie’s wife Malla makes several video calls on an illegal and hidden rebel communication device to try and find his whereabouts, and receives assurances that they are on their way. Then she attempts to cook Bantha Surprise while watching a local-cable cooking show by the eccentric, four-armed Chef Gormaanda.

Family friend Saun Dann arrives with gifts for each of them—including an erotic VR brain implantation chair for Chewbacca’s father Itchy—even as the Empire declares martial law on the planet. Princess Leia and C-3PO contact Malla and ask Saun Dann to look after the family. Stormtroopers arrive at the door to search the place for Solo and Chewbacca. One of the Imperial officers inspects a hologram-box and spends a few minutes to enjoy a music video on it. Saun is coerced to leave.

Alone, the young Wookie named Lumpy proves to be a nuisance to the stormtroopers during their search, so the family distracts him by having him watch a cartoon of Boba Fett and Darth Vader. Finally satisfied that the rebels are not there, the stormtroopers leave and Lumpy finally checks out the video introduction to the electronics kit left him as a gift by Saun. He uses the kit to build a television and watch a live-broadcast local television program. The program is interrupted by the announcement of an Imperial curfew being imposed.

An individual stormtrooper, B4-7-11, returns to the home to threaten Lumpy, but is intercepted by Han and Chewie, who have finally arrived. They defeat him and Han leaves. Saun returns and answers a call from an Imperial officer, lying about the fate of B4-7-11 . Saun leaves, and the Wookies finally undertake their Life Day rituals.

The main ritual involves donning robes, passing into a ball of light that teleports them to the Tree of Life, where they are joined by other Wookies, as well as R2-D2, C-3PO, Han Solo, and Princess Leia, who have teleported here by some unknown means. The English-speaking characters make a speech before Leia sings a traditional song. This causes Chewbacca to go into a reverie, recalling his recent adventures with the Rebellion, always from odd out-of-body ,third-person perspectives, as if from camera droids littered about the galaxy.

After Chewbacca’s reverie, they return home, sit at the table for dinner, and bow their heads in reverent prayer.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0193524/

Orange/blue SHIELD Agent Interfaces

15 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The SHIELD helicarrier cockpit has dozens and dozens of agents sitting at desktop screens, working 3D mice and keyboards, speaking to headsets, and doing superspy information work.

The camera mostly sweeps by these interfaces, never lingering too hard on them. It’s hard to see any details because of the motion blur, but given the few pauses we do see:

Wireframe of the helicarrier (A map to help locate problems?)
Gantt chart (Literally for the nascent Avengers initiative?)
Complex, node-network diagram (Datamining as part of the ongoing search for Loki?)
View of a flying camera pointing down. (You might think this is a live view from the bottom of the Helicarrier, but it’s above water, and this seems to be showing land, so recorded? part of the search?)
Live-video displays of cameras around the Helicarrier

There are others that appear later (see the next entry) but these bear some special note for a couple of reasons.

The ones that are instantly recognizable make sense at this glanceable level.
I couldn’t spot any repeats, even among the fuidget-filled screens (this represents a lot of work.)
The screens are all either orange or blue. Not as in orange and blue highlights. I mean each screen is either strictly values of orange or strictly values of blue. Maybe cyan.

A high-tech control room with multiple workstations and monitors, featuring a person in a black outfit standing confidently in the foreground, overseeing operations.

A futuristic control room featuring multiple monitors and workstations. A woman in a dark uniform interacts with a console, while others are busy at their stations in the background.

The cinematic colors

Wait, what? Look at that screen cap again. Once you have it pointed out to you, it’s striking. What’s going on with all the (tropey) orange-and-blue screens? What purpose does the two-part color palette serve here? My suspicion is that it’s because we’re not meant to read these screens, but rather to see them. That is, it doesn’t forward the story for the audience to notice anything on the screens, but of course the screens have to be there. (SHIELD wouldn’t pass your initial sniff test if it wasn’t working with information on a massive scale.) But the screens can’t distract us here, when we’re meant to get caught up in the epic scale of what’s happening—an aircraft carrier is lifting off water to effing fly (even if it can’t)—and so the screens are constrained to the orange/blue that is the palette of the rest of the frame. Additionally the contrast turned down on the content to get you to not pay too much attention to them, except as part of the overall tableau. It’s deliberate backgrounding.

It’s extradiegetic but still a lovely and subtle use of interfaces as part of the storytelling.

Doing my due diligence: Of course it would be pretty terrible design to actually stick these highly constrained palettes in front of users. You’d be wasting your agents’ color vision as additional channels for information. Even if this was some sort of diegetic mode during liftoff that adds a visual signal for agents to let them know they were in a critical safety maneuver, if it’s actually critical, then agents need more information, not less.

Plus, the next time we see a bunch of agent screens, they’re back to full color. So I’m pretty sure it’s an extradiegetic thing that we have to gloss over.

Grabby hologram

1 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

After Pepper tosses off the sexy bon mot “Work hard!” and leaves Tony to his Avengers initiative homework, Tony stands before the wall-high translucent displays projected around his room.

Amongst the videos, diagrams, metadata, and charts of the Tesseract panel, one item catches his attention. It’s the 3D depiction of the object, the tesseract itself, one of the Infinity Stones from the MCU. It is a cube rendered in a white wireframe, glowing cyan amidst the flat objects otherwise filling the display. It has an intense, cold-blue glow at its center. Small facing circles surround the eight corners, from which thin cyan rule lines extend a couple of decimeters and connect to small, facing, inscrutable floating-point numbers and glyphs.

Wanting to look closer at it, he reaches up and places fingers along the edge as if it were a material object, and swipes it away from the display. It rests in his hand as if it was a real thing. He studies it for a minute and flicks his thumb forward to quickly switch the orientation 90° around the Y axis.

Then he has an Important Thought and the camera cuts to Agent Coulson and Steve Rogers flying to the helicarrier.

So regular readers of this blog (or you know, fans of blockbuster sci-fi movies in general) may have a Spidey-sense that this feels somehow familiar as an interface. Where else do we see a character grabbing an object from a volumetric projection to study it? That’s right, that seminal insult-to-scientists-and-audiences alike, Prometheus. When David encounters the Alien Astrometrics VP, he grabs the wee earth from that display to nuzzle it for a little bit. Follow the link if you want that full backstory. Or you can just look and imagine it, because the interaction is largely the same: See display, grab glowing component of the VP and manipulate it.

Two anecdotes are not yet a pattern, but I’m glad to see this particular interaction again. I’m going to call it grabby holograms (capitulating a bit on adherence to the more academic term volumetric projection.) We grow up having bodies and moving about in a 3D world, so the desire to grab and turn objects to understand them is quite natural. It does require that we stop thinking of displays as untouchable, uninterruptable movies and more like toy boxes, and it seems like more and more writers are catching on to this idea.

More graphics or more information?

Additionally, the fact that this object is the one 3D object in its display is a nice affordance that it can be grabbed. I’m not sure whether he can pull the frame containing the JOINT DARK ENERGY MISSION video to study it on the couch, but I’m fairly certain I knew that the tesseract was grabbable before Tony reached out.

On the other hand, I do wonder what Tony could have learned by looking at the VP cube so intently. There’s no information there. It’s just a pattern on the sides. The glow doesn’t change. The little glyph sticks attached to the edges are fuigets. He might be remembering something he once saw or read, but he didn’t need to flick it like he did for any new information. Maybe he has flicked a VP tesseract in the past?

Augmented “reality”

Rather, I would have liked to have seen those glyph sticks display some useful information, perhaps acting as leaders that connected the VP to related data in the main display. One corner’s line could lead to the Zero Point Extraction chart. Another to the lovely orange waveform display. This way Tony could hold the cube and glance at its related information. These are all augmented reality additions.

Augmented VP

Or, even better, could he do some things that are possible with VPs that aren’t possible with AR. He should be able to scale it to be quite large or small. Create arbitrary sections, or plan views. Maybe fan out depictions of all objects in the SHIELD database that are similarly glowy, stone-like, or that remind him of infinity. Maybe…there’s…a…connection…there! Or better yet, have a copy of JARVIS study the data to find correlations and likely connections to consider. We’ve seen these genuine VP interactions plenty of places (including Tony’s own workshop), so they’re part of the diegesis.

In any case, this simple setup works nicely, in which interaction with a cool media helps underscore the gravity of the situation, the height of the stakes. Note to selves: The imperturbable Tony Stark is perturbed. Shit is going to get real.

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

Monthly Archives: December 2015