Monthly Archives: July 2017

Vaulting Boots of Valtor

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Mordo wears the Vaulting Boots of Valtor throughout the movie and first demonstrates their use to Dr. Strange when they are sparring. The Boots allow the user to walk, run, or jump on air as if it were solid ground.

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When activated, the sole of each boot creates a circular field of force in anticipation of a footfall in midair, as if creating free-floating stepping stones.

How might this work as tech?

The main interaction design challenge is how the wearer indicates where he wants a stepping-stone to appear. The best solution is to let Mordo’s footfall location and motion inform the boots when and where he expects there to be a solid surface. (Anyone who has stumbled while misjudging the height or location of a step on a stairway knows how differently you treat a step where you expect there to be solid footing.)

If this were a technological device, sensors within the boots would retain a detailed history of the wearer’s stride for all possible speeds and distances of movement. The boots would detect muscle tension and flexion combined with the owner’s direction and velocity to accurately predict the placement of each step and then insert an appropriately elevated and angled stepping stone. The boots would know the difference between each of these styles of movement, walking, running, and sprinting and behave accordingly.

As a result, Mordo could always remain upright and stable regardless of his intended direction or how high he had climbed. And while Mordo may be a sorcerer with exceptional physical training, he isn’t superhuman. With the power of the boots he is only able to run and step as high as he could normally if for example he was taking a set of stairs two or three at a time.

As a magical device, the intelligence imbued in the boots is limited to the awareness of the intent of the sorcerer and knows where to place each force-field stepping-stone.

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The glowing bits

As each step lands, the placement of the boot results in a brief energy discharge in the shape of a brilliant glowing gold circle. Is this a bug in combat, or a feature? The blog has before called out how glowing bits on a warrior make them an easier target, but it’s worth noting that Mordo’s feet are actually on individual stepping stones for less than a half a second. He leaves them behind as he goes. If someone targeted the circles themselves, they’d mostly be targeting where he was rather than where he is, so I’d count it as a distracting feature. As long as he wasn’t being targeted with a long-distance area-of-effect weapon.

Activation?

When describing them to Strange, Mordo demonstrates the effect with a subtle kick. It’s not clear if he’s activating the boots or just demonstrating that they have inherent magical powers.

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These boots are awesome. They would require a lot of practice to get used to, but after some tumbles a user could always acquire the high ground on an opponent and they would never need a ladder to change a light bulb. What’s not known is what would happen if the user tried to do parkour style moves where a step would be perpendicular to the ground. Could Mordo walk on walls or the ceiling of a room?

More!

It would be cool to know more about these boots. Could Mordo climb to a given height and then just stand there or is each step is  a limited duration effect?  Could the boots be used offensively as a kind of boot sized force field? In a fight, Mordor could lash out with a sidekick/step that stops an onrushing attacker not unlike hitting a brick wall.

Since he’s heavily set up to the Big Bad in the sequel, we’ll likely see more of these relics, and get some more of the questions answered.

The Cloak of Levitation, Part 4: Improvements

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In prior posts we looked at an overview of the cloak, pondered whether it could ever work in reality (Mostly, in the far future), and whether or not the cloak could be considered agentive. (Mostly, yes.) In this last post I want to look at what improvements we might make if I was designing something akin to this for the real world.

Given its wealth of capabilities, the main complaint might be its lack of language.

A mute sidekick

It has a working theory of mind, a grasp of abstract concepts, and intention, so why does it not use language as part of a toolkit to fulfill its duties? Let’s first admit that mute sidekicks are kind of a trope at this point. Think R2D2, Silent Bob, BB8, Aladdin’s Magic Carpet (Disney), Teller, Harpo, Bernardo / Paco (admittedly obscure), Mini-me. They’re a thing.

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Yes, I know she could talk to other fairies, but not to Peter.

Despite being a trope, its muteness in a combat partner is a significant impediment. Imagine its being able to say, “Hey Steve, he’s immune to the halberd. But throw that ribcage-looking thing on the wall at him, and you’ll be good.” Strange finds himself in life-or-death situations pretty much constantly, so having to disambiguate vague gestures wastes precious time that might make the difference between life and death. For, like, everyone on Earth.

Additionally, its muteness makes it very difficult for Strange to ever understand the reasoning behind any but its most obvious actions. That would be very important if it ever did anything ethically questionable, because intent would be difficult to gauge without the abstract representation of language.

So between the speed and clarity gains of language, I’d want to equip the Cloak with language: spoken, sign, direct-to-brain, or maybe even a mystical weave which, like the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter, could mystically transform in real-time to convey linguistic information.

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Like this but woven.

Using apologetics, though, we can see that the muteness isn’t a bug, it’s an important feature. Read on.

But, the hero…

One of the things writers “buy” with a mute sidekick is it lets the hero be the hero. If the Cloak could speak, suddenly we have a “sidekick” who knows much more and can do a few more things—i.e. fly—than our hero can. This is not good for optics. Note that the Cloak’s last intention seems to be “Keep him looking sorcererly,” which implies a service status, and which it could not do if it upstaged him. So from a narrative perspective, the muteness means they are less like a crime fighting duo, and more of a hero-with-a-sidekick, or dare I note it: a familiar.

Also if you contrast the cape with JARVIS and the Iron HUD, note that this has language, but that conversation is wholly private with Tony. To an outsider, it looks like Tony is just the Iron Man. They may have no clue that it’s probably all the suit. So JARVIS’ use of language doesn’t get in the way of keeping Tony looking hero-ey.  I’d even go so far as to say that the muteness is the thing that lets the Cloak be primarily agentive, as language would encourage its use as an assistant.

Other improvements

Language is the big one, but there are a few other improvements I could imagine.

Cloaklet

If this were for a soldier or a police officer or anyone else who could expect combat as part of their job, the Cloak might make them look cartoonish, like a cosplayer rather than a person with authority. But, hey, if it let them fly, and can supernatural protection, maybe that impression wouldn’t last long. Maybe they could take advantage of being underestimated. But I’d still want to look at how little fabric we could get away with and still maintain its benefits.

Remote control / telecommunication

Another constraint seems to be that it has some proximity limits. To imprint on Tony, it makes some social sense that it would want to be within “handshake distance.” But when Strange is astrally overseeing the emergency operation of his own body (a later post), the Cloak sits back at the Sanctum and doesn’t rush to help when things get fighty. Extending its connectivity would help it fulfill its duties. At the very least tape a cell phone to a pocket and let Strange shout orders at it.

Whew. So that’s my take on the Cloak of Levitation. It’s a marvelous piece of speculative “tech” that fits Tony, his future-role as Sorcerer Supreme, and is nicely unique in the MCU.

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It’s a great sophisticated example of agentive tech the constraints of which make complete narrative sense. I hope we get to learn much more of this marvelous, agentive familiar in the sequel.

The Cloak of Levitation, Part 3: But is it agentive?

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Full_cover

So I mentioned in the intro to this review that I was drawn to review Doctor Strange (with my buddy and co-reviewer Scout Addis) because the Cloak displays some interesting qualities in relation to the book I just published. Buy it, read it, review it on amazon.com, it’s awesome.

That sales pitch done, I can quickly cover the key concepts here.

  • A tool, like a hammer, is a familiar but comparatively-dumb category of thing that only responds to a user’s input. A hammer is an example. Tool has been the model of the thing we’re designing in interaction design for, oh, 60 years, but it is being mostly obviated by narrow artificial intelligence, which can be understood as automatic, assistive, or agentive.
  • Assistant technology helps its user with the task she is focused on: Drawing her attention, providing information, making suggestions, maybe helping augment her precision or force. If we think of a hammer again, an assistive might draw her attention to the best angle to strike the nail, or use an internal gyroscope to gently correct her off-angle strike.
  • Agentive technology does the task for its user. Again with the hammer, she could tell hammerbot (a physical agent, but there are virtual ones, too) what she wants hammered and how. Her instructions might be something like: Hammer a hapenny nail every decimeter along the length of this plinth. As it begins to pound away, she can then turn her attention to mixing paint or whatever.

When I first introduce people to these distinctions, I step one rung up on Wittgenstein’s Ladder and talk about products that are purely agentive or purely assistive, as if agency was a quality of the technology. (Thabks to TU prof P.J. Stappers for distinguishing these as ontological and epistemological approaches.) The Roomba, for example, is almost wholly agentive as a vacuum. It has no handle for you to grab, because it does the steering and pushing and vacuuming.

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Yes, it’s a real thing you can own.

Once you get these basic ideas in your head, we can take another step up the Ladder together and clarify that agency is not necessarily a quality of the thing in the world. It’s subtler than that. It’s a mode of relationship between user and agent, one which can change over time. Sophisticated products should be able to shift their agency mode (between tool, assistant, agent, and automation) according to the intentions and wishes of their user. Hammerbot is useful, but still kind of dumb compared to its human. If there’s a particularly tricky or delicate nail to be driven, our carpenter might ask hammerbot’s assistance, but really, she’ll want to handle that delicate hammering herself.

Which brings us back to the Cloak.

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I wish I knew how to quit you.

Watch the movie carefully and you’ll see that the only time it acts purely on command is when Strange uses it to fly to the Dark Dimension. So it has all of one tool-like function. It initiates the rest of its actions on its own.

So it is assistive or agentive? Well, again, that’s tricky, because it depends on which function we’re talking about. Here is my backworlded list of those functions, in order of importance.

  1. Obey commands (subject to some mystical and unmentioned 4 Laws of Relics?)
  2. Prevent harm to Strange
    • Halt the thing threatening him
    • If that’s not possible, get Strange out of harm’s way (pull him to safety)
    • Catch him, if he’s falling
    • Critical case: if Strange is disabled and threatened, take care of the threat (the head-wrap scene)
  3. Guide him toward the best tactic for his current situation
  4. Keep him looking sorcererly
    • Don yourself when appropriate
    • Try and do your work while being worn (don’t jump off Strange’s shoulders to do something, if you can avoid it)
    • Groom him if he becomes untidy

Let’s look at each of these.

1. Obeying commands could be any category. Strange can gesturally command it to fly, as he does, treating it as a tool. He can command it to assist him in some task, or assign it a task to do on its own. So that one is all over the board.

2. Preventing harm is mostly agentive. After all, if it’s preventing harm from happening, it should just do it, and not ask, right? The question would just be noise because the answer would almost always be, “of course.” Like a mystical Spider-Sense, this helps Strange avoid a threat he didn’t even know was there. This allows Strange to focus on the most critical thing in the situation, because the Cloak has his back for the minor stuff. (Which, admittedly, isn’t quite how Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense works.)

Strange-spider-sense

There’s a bit of conceptual hairsplitting to do here. When Strange is in combat, you might wonder, isn’t his attention on the combat, so it’s assisting him with it? Sure, but that’s the category of thing he’s trying to do, more appropriate to our description of it rather than what he’s thinking. His attention is not on the category of thing he’s doing but on the thing itself. Not combat, but bringing down Kaecelius.

So I’d argue what we see is agentive. Note that it’s easy to imagine an assistive prevention of harm, too. If Strange knows there is a big rock heading his way, he’s going to dodge. The Cloak can predict how well his dodge will work, and add a little oomph if it’s not going to be enough. But I don’t think we see that in the movie.

3. Guiding him toward the best situational tactic is an interesting case. It’s agentive, but in the one case we really see it in action, it looks assistive. Strange is reaching for the halberd on the wall, and the Cloak, knowing that would be ineffective at best, is dragging him toward the thing that will work, which are the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak. Is it assisting him to grab the right thing?

Yes, but again, it’s a question of attention. Strange’s attention is on getting the halberd. The Cloak has run through the scenarios, and knows that probabilistically, the halberd is the wrong choice. So it is having to intervene and draw Strange’s attention to the Bands. In monitoring and correcting Strange’s tactics, it is operating outside his attention and acting agentively.

4. When the Cloak works to keep Strange looking sorcererly it is similarly monitoring his appearance and making adjustments as needed. Strange’s attention does not need to go there, so it’s agentive.

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Hang on, you cry, what about that time Strange tells it to stop wiping his face? That’s a command. His attention is on it. Yes, but Strange isn’t commanding it to begin some new task that he wanted it to accomplish. The Cloak found a trigger (blood on face) and initiated a behavior to correct the problem. Strange is correcting the Cloak that he finds this level of grooming to be too much. In the second part of the book I refer to this as tuning a behavior, and it’s one of the interactions that distinguish agentive tech from automation, which does not afford this kind of personalization.

So, in short, the Cloak demonstrates lots and lots of agentive properties, and provides a rich example that helps illuminate differences in the core concepts. If you want to know more about these thoughts as they apply to real world tech as opposed to sci-fi interfaces, there’s that book I mentioned.

Next up, we’ll get to some critiques of the Cloak and suggestions for how it might be improved if it were a real world thing.

The Cloak of Levitation, Part 2: Could it ever work?

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How could this work as technology instead of magic?

In the prior post I looked at the Cloak as a bit of wearable technology. Today let’s ask ourselves how possible this is in the real world.

The abilities of the Cloak listed in the first post imply a great deal of functionality: Situational awareness, lightning fast thinking, precision actuators throughout its fabric, gravity controls for itself and its wearer, goal awareness, knowledge of the world. Some of these aren’t going to happen, but some are conceivable over time.

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Parts of it are conceivable over time

Some of those abilities make sense with what we know of the arc of technology.

Actuators

Technology keeps shrinking, so a fabric made of strong actuators might be conceivable. I’m not sure muscle wire will ever be this strong, but let’s presume generative design can discover a way to use its relatively weak strength for greater-than-human feats of strength, and that wires can be coordinated when woven into a fabric.

Sensors

The Cloak has complete situational awareness, but where are its sensors? It demonstrates field awareness. We don’t see sensors, but it has to be building this awareness from something. One possibility is that if it was able to connect to sensors around it, much like The Machine and Samaritan Super AIs from Person of Interest or Batman’s cellular panopticon. Alternately, the cape could be dotted with sensors that detect in the x-ray or infrared spectrums, so they can be hidden under the fabric. Let’s say this is pretty futuristic, but possible.

The Cloak’s AI

Yes we have crazy fast processors that seem to keep getting faster, so perhaps the processors could become embeddable in the cloth or perhaps the fibulae. And the amount of cloth in the Cloak is much more than most wearables, so sure, let’s say the computational power can be made this small and sartorial.

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Writing this blog takes my vocabulary to some obscure places.

There is the problem of the AI. Some of the Cloak’s abilities imply general, rather than narrow, artificial intelligence. It has complete situation awareness, a clear theory of mind, and seems to learn. We’re not at general AI yet and at least according to Nick Bostrom’s poll, computer scientists are estimating it will be about another decade until we get there, if we can get there at all. Opinions are split as to whether it’s possible, but let’s go optimistic with this one and put it in the conceivable category, with the caveat that it may be wishful thinking.

But some parts break the laws of physics

But then there are a few things that just break the laws of physics, the first of which is flying.

There’s no evidence from other things in the scenes that it is employing a propellant of some kind to do this lifting. It just moves where it wants to. Cloak don’t give a shit. Add the fact that it can hang in place (see the vitrine gif, above) as if it can just ignore the Earth’s gravity, and we’ve got something that earns the Isaac Newton seal of WTF.

It also seems able to pull in any arbitrary direction in space with a great deal of force, as it does when it drags around one of the beefier zealots in a defend-the-master move that would make a Molossus war dog lower its head in respect. Flatworms are the closest thing to a muscled bit of fabric that evolution has come up with, and I don’t think physics would allow it to do this kind of maneuver, either. 

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Then, when Strange flies wearing it, it doesn’t seem to use its powers to carry him. That would look more like a hammock, or a flying carpet. Instead it somehow grants the power of arbitrary space positioning to him, and then it just gets to relax and ride along and concentrate on looking majestic.

So it can pull in any direction with no anchor, propellant, or regard for gravity; and grant this ability to someone on contact. Sorry, but I think we have to admit that these aspects of the Cloak are just wish fulfillment.

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Even if flight could be overlooked, then there comes the question of where’s the power coming from? I don’t see much battery technology trending towards infinite especially when it has to be small enough to be wearable.

So while an engaging vision, we have to be quite careful about drawing design lessons from the Cloak. Enabling technology would be far in the future. And even though personal flight technology (of sorts) exists, but we should take in mind their designs have to deal with the very real issues of thrust and power.

That’s enough for today. In the next post we’ll look at the intelligence and agency evident in the Cloak.