At this point there is still an hour of film and a dozen interfaces to go. Fortunately, by abandoning a strict chronological approach these can be grouped into four types of interfaces.
The LoTeks and Yakuza both use a kind of high tech binoculars.
Johnny enters cyberspace to try and find the download access codes for the data, an attempt that fails.
Retrieving the data without the codes needs two brain reading medical scanners and a final LoTek brain hacking device.
In between action scenes Johnny and others make video phone calls using a variety of different gadgets. The last of these phone calls itself demonstrates two interesting interfaces, a puppet avatar and a cringing computer.
In this remaining hour Johnny is always accompanied by Jane, the other lead character. She won’t appear in any of these discussions though, because she never uses any interfaces. Jane is a bodyguard, who relies on simple but reliable blades and throwing spikes for weapons. She has an augmented nervous system, with sockets in her arms that we briefly see connected to some electronic medical equipment, but alas we never learn the full extent of her capabilities. I suggest reading Neuromancer if you’re interested in cyberpunk body modifications, as Jane is just a renaming of Molly who appeared in the original Johnny Mnemonic short story and Neuromancer.
There is also Anna, the former CEO of Pharmakom who is now a “neural net persona” within the Pharmakom mainframe after being “imprinted” shortly before her death. She appears every so often on computer screens to both Johnny and Takahashi. I don’t consider her to be an interface, as the interaction between her and other characters is simple conversation and she is treated no differently to an intrusive video phone caller. Chris may wish to jump in and provide his own analysis though. 🙂
Johnny leaves the airport by taxi, ending up in a disreputable part of town. During his ride we see another video phone call with a different interface, and the first brief appearance of some high tech binoculars. I’ll return to these later, for the moment skipping ahead to the last of the relatively simple and single-use physical gadgets.
Johnny finds the people he is supposed to meet in a deserted building but, as events are not proceeding as planned, he attaches another black box with glowing red status light to the outside of the door as he enters. Although it looks like the motion detector we saw earlier, this is a bomb.
This is indeed a very bad neighbourhood of Newark. Inside are the same Yakuza from Beijing, who plan to remove Johnny’s head. There is a brief fight, which ends when Johnny uses his watch to detonate the bomb. It isn’t clear whether he pushes or rotates some control, but it is a single quick action.
This demonstrates an interesting difference between interface design for the physical world and for software systems. Inside a computer, actions are just flipping bits in storage and thus easy to undo. Even supposedly destructive actions such as erasing files can often be reversed. In the real world, the effects of, for example, explosions tend to be much more permanent.
We generally don’t want destructive actions to be too easy to perform, from guns and other things that go boom to formatting computer disks.
A widely used solution in the real world is the safety catch, as with guns, or arming switch, seen in countless thriller films with nuclear weapons. Another example are the two-hand safety switches used in high voltage electrical distribution panels. Activation of these requires two individual actions, separated in time and at least a short distance in space. Some systems, both real and in film, go even further and have covers on the arming switches, so even just preparing for activation requires two separate physical actions.
While the bomb is on his belt, Johnny doesn’t have to worry about accidentally pressing the “explode” button on his watch because the bomb is not active. Only after he has armed it and placed on the door can the watch activate the bomb, so he can take his time and verify whether or not it is necessary before doing so. And when it is active, he can do so very quickly even though he is in the middle of a fight.
But safety catches and arming switches introduce modes to an interaction, which have a bad reputation in interface design. Had the watch-bomb designers followed most conventional GUI design guidelines, there would be no arming switch on the bomb. Instead the watch would have popped up a “Do you really want to explode the bomb (Y/N)?” dialog, possibly with a short delay to ensure Johnny thought about his decision before answering. He would have been decapitated.
Compare to LoTek
Later on in the film we see an example of a poorly designed system without a safety catch. The LoTeks in their bridge home have a defensive “bug dropper”, so called because it drops ancient Volkswagens from a great height.
The bug dropper can be activated by pushing just a single handle. Because there is no safety switch, a guard accidentally drops a flaming VW Beetle onto the lead characters, nearly killing them.
Conclusion
From the description above it would seem that safety catches are the obvious solution. But of course it’s more complicated than that. Consider what would have happened if Johnny had met friends instead of enemies and settled down for a conversation. Thirty minutes later they’ve agreed on another meeting, and Johnny taps his watch to bring up the reminders app. Oops!
Should the bomb have disarmed itself after a given time period? If it did, how would Johnny be notified of this?
Most of us do not design interfaces for lethal hardware and life or death situations. There are however an increasing number of drones and other physical devices which are now remotely controlled from phone or tablet apps rather than dedicated hardware controllers as in the past. The “Internet of Things” will bring even more real world actions under computer interface control. In the future, we will most likely see more of these safety catches and arming switches in computer interfaces, and we need to figure out how to use them properly.
Later, in the brain hacking scene, we’ll hear two more sentences spoken.
Completionists: There’s also extensive use of voice output during a cyberspace search sequence, but there Johnny is wearing a headset so he is the only one who can hear it. That is sufficiently different to be left out of this discussion.
Voice is public
Sonic output in general and voice in particular have the advantage of being omnidirectional, so the user does not need to pay visual attention to the device, and, depending on volume and ambient noise, can be understood at much greater distances than a screen can be read. These same qualities are not so desirable if the user would prefer to keep the message or information private. We can’t tell whether these systems can detect the presence or absence of people, but the hotel message centre only spoke when Johnny was alone. Later in the film we will see two medical systems that don’t talk at all. This is most likely deliberate because few patients would appreciate their symptoms being broadcast to all and sundry.
Unless you’re the only one in the room
The bathroom tap is interesting because the temperature message was in English. This is a Beijing hotel, and the scientists who booked the suite are Vietnamese, so why? It’s not because we the audience need to know this particular detail. But we do have one clue: Johnny cursed rather loudly once he was inside the bathroom. I suggest that there is a hotel computer monitoring the languages being used by guests within the room and adjusting voice outputs to match. Current day word processors, web browsers, and search engines can recognise the language of typed text input and load the matching spellcheck dictionaries, so it’s a fair bet that by 2021 our computers will be able to do the same for speech.
After fleeing the Yakuza in the hotel, Johnny arrives in the Free City of Newark, and has to go through immigration control. This process appears to be entirely automated, starting with an electronic passport reader.
After that there is a security scanner, which is reminiscent of HAL from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The green light runs over Johnny from top to bottom.
Looking at the picture, we can see that this green light is somehow making Johnny’s skeleton visible. It would be possible, by having an X-ray imaging system running at the same time and then re-projecting the X-ray image back onto the body, but why? Since there don’t appear to be any actual human beings on duty, I can only suggest that it is meant to look intimidating and impressive to encourage obedience. In the film Johnny appears to be alone and cannot see this himself, but it would be much more common for there to be multiple passengers, so each could watch the others being scanned.
There is also a screen showing another scan, a blurry body image, and text appearing on the right side. A voice repeats the text content. For the first time we see a blue background, the most common color for futuristic film interfaces.
The scanner detects Johnny’s implant, but whatever secrecy measures are present cause the system to decide that it is a registered dyslexia aid. The popup alert below includes the registration issuer and a domain name, so perhaps this is online verification over the Internet. Presumably Johnny can see this screen himself, if he cares.
The voiceover helpfully informs Johnny that there is “synaptic seepage”, and he should seek medical attention within 24 hours. This shows quite high level decision making by the system and an offer of assistance. Johnny says “thanks” in reply, an anthropomorphic response to this seemingly intelligent machine.
However, there seems to be a more detailed explanation in smaller text on the right of the display, and this isn’t announced. It’s not clear in this scene whether Johnny can see this display or not, but even if he could it would be difficult to read. Perhaps this is a legacy system from the days when airport security had actual staff.
Next
At this point Johnny leaves the airport, riding in a taxi from the airport. It is a good time for the first review of a group of related interfaces, which will be the next series of posts.
Once Johnny has installed his motion detector on the door, the brain upload can begin.
3. Building it
Johnny starts by opening his briefcase and removing various components, which he connects together into the complete upload system. Some of the parts are disguised, and the whole sequence is similar to an assassin in a thriller film assembling a gun out of harmless looking pieces.
It looks strange today to see a computer system with so many external devices connected by cables. We’ve become accustomed to one piece computing devices with integrated functionality, and keyboards, mice, cameras, printers, and headphones that connect wirelessly.
Cables and other connections are not always considered as interfaces, but “all parts of a thing which enable its use” is the definition according to Chris. In the early to mid 1990s most computer user were well aware of the potential for confusion and frustration in such interfaces. A personal computer could have connections to monitor, keyboard, mouse, modem, CD drive, and joystick – and every single device would use a different type of cable. USB, while not perfect, is one of the greatest ever improvements in user interfaces.
Why not go wireless? Wireless devices remove the need for a physical connection, but this means that anyone, not just you, could potentially connect. So instead of worrying about whether we have the right kind of cable, we now worry about the right kind of Bluetooth pairing and WiFi encryption password scheme. Mobile wireless devices also need their own batteries, which have to be charged. So wireless may seem visually cleaner, but comes with its own set of problems.
As of early 2016 we have two new standards, Lightning and USB-C, that are orientation-independent (only fifty years after audio cables), high bandwidth, and able to transmit power to peripherals as well. Perhaps by 2021 cables will have made a comeback as the usual way to connect devices.
2. Explaining it
Johnny explains the process to the scientists. He needs them to begin the upload by pushing a button, helpfully labelled “start”, on the gadget that resembles an optical disk drive. There’s a big red button as well, which is not explained but would make an excellent “cancel” button.
It would be simpler if Johnny just did this himself. But we will shortly discover that the upload process is apparently very painful. If Johnny had his hands near the system, he might involuntarily push another button or disturb a cable. So for them, having a single, easily differentiated button to press minimizes their chance of messing it up.
1. Making codes
He also sticks a small black disk on the hotel room’s silver remote control. The small disk is evidently is a wireless controller or camera of some kind. The scientists must watch the upload progress counter, and as it approaches the end, use this modified remote to grab three frames from the TV display, which will become the “access code” for the data. (More on this below.)
None of the buttons on this remote have markings or labels, but neither Johnny nor the scientist who will be using it are bothered. Perhaps this hotel chain tries to please every possible guest by not favouring any particular language? But even in that case, I’d expect there to be some kind of symbols on the buttons and a multilingual manual to explain the meaning of each. Maybe Johnny spends so much time in hotel suites that he has memorised the button layout?
Short of a mind reading remote that can translate any button press into “what the user intended”, I have to admit this is a terrible interface.
(There is a label on the black disk, but I have no idea what it means or even which script that is. Anyone?)
0. Go go go
Johnny plugs in his implant, puts on a headset with more cables, and bites down on a mouthguard. He’s ready.
The scientist pushes the start button and the upload begins. Johnny sees the data stream in his headset as a flood of graphics and text.
Why does he need the headset when there is a direct cable connection to the implant? The movie doesn’t make it explicit. It could be related to the images used as the access code. (More on this below.) Perhaps the images need to be processed by the recipient’s own optic nerve system for more reliable storage?
Still, in the spirit of apologetics we should try to find a better explanation than “an opportunity for 1995 cutting edge computer generated graphics.” Perhaps it is a very flashy progress indicator? Older computer systems had blinking lights on disk drives to indicate activity, copied on some of today’s USB sticks. Current-day file upload or download GUIs have progress bars. As processing and graphics capabilities increase, it will be possible for software to display thumbnails or previews of the actual data being transferred without slowing down.
Unfortunately there is an argument against this, which is that the obvious upload progress indicator is a numeric display counting gigabytes down to zero, and it makes a fast chirping sound as a sonic indicator as well. The counter shows the data flowing at gigabytes per second, the entire upload lasting about a minute. There’s also the problem that it’s not Johnny who is interested in knowing whether the upload is scientific data rather than, say, a video collection; but the scientists, and they can’t see it.
As the counter drops below one hundred, the scientist points the remote with black disk at the TV display, currently showing a cartoon, and presses the middle button. The image from the TV appears overlaid on the data stream to Johnny. This is a little odd, because Johnny assured the scientists that he wouldn’t know what the access codes were himself. Maybe these brief flashes are not enough time for him to remember these particular images among the gigabytes of visual content. But the way they’re shown to us, I’ll bet you can remember them when they come up again later in the plot.
Two more images are grabbed before the counter stops. When the upload finishes, the three images are printed out. (In the original film this is shown upside down, so I have rotated the image.)
Tagged:
So what are the images for? The script isn’t clear. I suggest that the images are being used as the equivalents of very large random numbers for whatever cryptography scheme protects the data against unauthorised access. Some current day systems use the timing of key presses and mouse movements as a source of randomness because humans simply can’t move their fingers with microsecond precision. Here, the human element makes it impossible to predict exactly which frame is chosen.
Humans also find images much easier to recognise than hundred digit numbers. Anyone who has seen the printout will be able to say whether a particular image is part of the access code or not with a high degree of confidence. In computer systems today, Secure Shell, or ssh, is a widely used encrypted terminal program for secure access to servers. Recent versions of ssh have a ‘randomart’ capability which shows a small ASCII icon generated from the current cryptographic key to everyone who logs on. If this ASCII icon appears different, this alerts everyone that the server key has been changed.
There’s one potential usability problem with the whole “pick three random images” mechanism. The last frame was grabbed when the counter was very close to zero. What would have happened if he had been too slow and missed altogether? Wouldn’t it be more reliable to have the upload system automatically grab the images rather than rely on a human? Chris suggests that maybe it secretly did grab three images that could have used without human input, but privileged the human input since it was more reliably random.
Quick aside: You may be asking, if images would be so wonderful, why aren’t we using them in this way already? It’s because our current security systems need not just very large random numbers, but very large random numbers with particular mathematical properties such as being prime. But let’s cut Johnny Mnemonic some slack, saying that by 2021 we may have new algorithms.
OK, back to the plot.
-1. Sharing the codes
The access codes are to be faxed from Beijing to Newark, although this gets interrupted by the Yakuza intruders. This is yet another device with unmarked buttons.
This device makes the same beeps and screeches as a 1990s analog fax machine. Since we’ll later learn that all the fax messages and phone calls are stored digitally in cyberspace, this must be a skeuomorphism, the old familiar audio tones now serving just as progress indicators.
As with other audio output, the tones allow the user to know that the transmission is proceeding and when it ends without having to pay full attention to the device. On the other hand, there is potential for confusion here as the digital upload is (presumably) much faster. Most current day computer systems could upload three photos, even in high resolution, well before the sequence of tones would complete. Users would most likely wait longer than actually necessary before moving on to their next task.
-2. Washing up
During the upload Johnny clenches his fists and bites his mouthguard. When the upload finishes, he retreats to the bathroom in considerable pain. At one point blood flows from his nose, and he swipes his hand over the tap to wash it down the drain. The bathroom announces that the water temperature is 17 degrees. We’ll come back to this later.
As Make It So emphasises in the chapter on brain interfaces, there is nothing in our current knowledge to suggest that writing or reading memories to or from a human brain would be painful. On the other hand, we know that information in the brain isthe shape of the neurons in the brain. Who knows what side effects will happen as those neurons are disconnected and reconnected as they need to be? We don’t know, so can’t really say whether it would hurt or not.
-3. Escaping the Yakuza
As mentioned in a prior post, while he is in the bathroom, the motion detector Johnny installed on the hotel door isn’t very effective and the Yakuza break in, kill everyone else, and acquire the second of the three access code images. Johnny escapes with the first image and flies to Newark, North America.
Johnny, with newly upgraded memory, goes straight to the hotel room where he meets the client’s scientists. Before the data upload, he quickly installs a motion detector on the hotel suite door. This is a black box that he carries clipped to his belt. He uses his thumb to activate it as he takes hold and two glowing red status lights appear.
Once placed on the door, there is just one glowing light. We don’t see exactly how Johnny controls the device, but for something this simple just one touch button would be sufficient.
A little later, after the brain upload (discussed in the next post), the motion detector goes off when four heavily armed Yakuza arrive outside the door. The single light starts blinking, and there’s a high pitched beep similar to a smoke alarm, but quieter.
Analysis
A sonic alarm is good, because it is omnidirectional. But being omnidirectional it might also notify the would-be attackers that they have been detected. Here the designers have erred too far on the side of caution. The alarm is so quiet that none of the scientists notice, and Johnny himself is lucky to be within a few metres when it goes off. The Yakuza burst in and slaughter the unaware scientists. It would almost certainly have been better for the alarm to be configured as loud as possible, ensuring everyone who needed to hear did so. And while the attackers would have been alerted, they might have been deterred by the thought of witnesses arriving.
In Beijing, Johnny steps into a hotel lift and pulls a small package out his pocket. He unwraps it to reveal the “Pemex MemDoubler”.
Johnny extends the cable from the device and plugs it into the implant in his head. The socket glows red once the connection is made.
Analysis: The jack
The jack looks like an audio plug, and like most audio plugs is round and has no coronal-orientation requirement. It also has a bulbous rather than pointed tip. Both of these are good design, as Johnny can’t see the socket directly and while accidentally poking yourself with a headphone style point is unlikely to be harmful, it would certainly be irritating.
The socket’s glow would be a useful indicator that the thing is working, but Johnny can’t see it! Probably these sockets and jacks are produced and used for other devices as well, as red status lights are common in this world.
There are easier and more convenient fictional brain plug interfaces, such as the neck plugs previously discussed on this website for Ghost In The Shell. But Johnny doesn’t want his implant to be too obvious, so this not so convenient plug may be a deliberate choice. Perhaps he tells inquisitive people that it’s for his Walkman.
Analysis: The device
The product name got a few chuckles from audiences in the 1990s, as the name is similar to a common classic Macintosh extension at the time, the Connectix RAM Doubler. This applied in-memory lossless data compression techniques to allow more or larger programs to run within the existing RAM.
The MemDoubler is apparently a software or firmware updater, modifying Johnny’s implant to use brain tissue twice as efficiently as before. It has voice output, again a slightly artificial sounding but not unpleasant voice. This announces that Johnny’s current capacity is 80 gigabytes. As the update is applied, a glowing progress bar gradually fills until the voice announces the new capacity of 160G.
(Going from 80G to 160G seems quaint today. But we should remember that the value of a mnemonic courier is secrecy, not quantity.)
Why does the MemDoubler need voice output? For such a simple task, the progress bar and a three digit numeric counter would seem adequate. But if there are complications—which for something wired into the brain might have an all too literal meaning for “fatal error”—a voice announcement would be able to include much more detail about the problem, or even alert bystanders if Johnny is rendered unconscious by the problem. (Given how current software installers operate, Johnny is fortunate that the MemDoubler did not insist on reciting the entire end user license agreement and warranty before the update could start.) Maybe the visual should be the default (to respect his professional need for secrecy), and the voice announcement adopted in an alert mode.
It’s also interesting that Johnny installs this immediately before he needs it, in the lift that is taking him to the hotel room where he will receive the data to be stored. Suppose someone else had been in the lift with him? In this world of routine body implants doubling your memory is probably not a crime, but at the time of writing diabetics will inject themselves in private even though that is harmless and necessary. Perhaps body-connected technology will be common enough in 2021 that public operation is considered normal, just as we have become accustomed to mobile phone conversations being carried out in public.
The Internet 2021 shot that begins the film ends in a hotel suite, where it wakes up lead character Johnny. This is where we see the first real interface in the film. It’s also where this discussion gets more complicated.
A note on my review strategy
As a 3D graphics enthusiast, I’d be happy just to analyze the cyberspace scenes, but when you write for Sci Fi Interfaces, there is a strict rule that every interface in a film must be subjected to inspection. And there are a lot of interfaces in Johnny Mnemonic. (Curse your exhaustive standards, Chris!)
A purely chronological approach which would spend too much time looking at trees and not enough at the forest. So I’ll be jumping back and forth a bit, starting with the gadgets and interfaces that appear only once, then moving on to the recurring elements, variations on a style or idea that are repeated during the film.
Description
The wakeup call arrives in the hotel room as a voice announcement—a sensible if obvious choice for someone who is asleep—and also as text on a wall screen, giving the date, time, and temperature. The voice is artificial sounding but pleasant rather than grating, letting you know that it’s a computer and not some hotel employee who let himself in. The wall display functions as both a passive television and an interactive computer monitor. Johnny picks up a small remote control to silence the wake up call.
This remote is a small black box like most current-day equivalents, but with a glowing red light at one end. At the time of writing blue lights and indicators are popular for consumer electronics, apparently following the preference set by science fiction films and noted in Make It So. Johnny Mnemonic is an outlier in using red lights, as we’ll see more of these as the film progresses. Here the glow might be some kind of infrared or laser beam that sends a signal, or it might simply indicate the right way to orient the control in the hand for the controls to make sense.
First thing every morning: Messages
After silencing the alarm, Johnny, like so many of us today, checks his email. (In 1995 doing so before even getting out of bed might have been intended to show his detachment from humanity. Today, it seems perfectly natural!) He uses the remote to switch the display to the hotel “Message Centre”. We see his thumb move around, so the remote must have multiple buttons, but can’t tell whether this is a simple arrow keypad or something more complicated.
The message centre of the New Darwin Inn system both displays the text message visually and also speaks it aloud in the same synthesized voice that woke him up. Voiceovers are common in films so the audience doesn’t have to try to read the cinema screen, but in this case it would be genuinely useful. Guests could start doing something else without needing to pay full attention to the display.
Is it necessary for Johnny to explicitly switch to the Message Center? The system could have displayed this message automatically after the wakeup call, or shown the 2021 equivalent of his InBox. On the other hand, this is a giant, clearly visible screen and Johnny was not alone in the suite. Johnny, and other guests, might wish to keep their communications private.
As Johnny has no messages, he uses the remote to switch the display to a TV channel.
The hotel room “phone” call
Next he uses the remote to make a phone call. He starts by using the remote to dial the number, which appears on the display. We can’t see whether he is typing numbers directly, or using arrow keys and an Enter or OK button to navigate around the onscreen keypad. It’s certainly convenient for guests to be able to make a call without getting out of bed, but a voice recognition interface might be even easier. We’ll see a phone system that accepts voice commands later on, so perhaps using the remote is just a preference.
What is the strange blue window to the right of the keypad? It’s there because all phone calls in 2021 are in fact video calls. The equivalent to a busy waiting tone in this world is a video splash screen. These can be customized by the recipient, here showing the company name, Dataflow.
And finally both parties can see and hear each other. Note also the graphical reverse, stop, and play buttons at the bottom right of the keypad. These imply some sort of recording capability, but we never see them used.
Next
I’ll discuss the 2021 phone system in more detail later on, so for now we just need to know that this phone call is the setup that sends Johnny to Beijing for his next, and hopefully last, job.
The “Internet 2021” shot introduces the cyberspace interface and environment that forms the backdrop for the film. (There’s also a lengthy and unhelpful text crawl, but we’ll pass over that.) Now let’s introduce the film using plain words instead.
When discussing the interfaces in a film it helps to know a little about the context in which it was made. I’ll talk more about this at the end, but for now you need to know that Johnny Mnemonic was released in 1995 and is both a cyberpunk and virtual reality film.
Cyberpunk was a subgenre of science fiction which began in the 1980s. Cyberpunk authors were the first to write extensively about personal computing technology, world wide computer networks, and virtual reality. By the end of the 1990s cyberpunk ideas had been absorbed into mainstream science fiction.
At the time of writing, 2016, virtual reality is a hot topic with megabytes devoted online to the prospects and implications of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and others. This “VR Boom” is actually the second of these, not something new. The first virtual reality boom took place in the mid 1990s, and Johnny Mnemonic was released in the middle of it. By the end of the 1990s virtual reality, like cyberpunk, had largely faded away.
The plot.
Johnny Mnemonic takes place in 2021. It’s a cyberpunk world, with corporations that are more powerful than governments and employ Yakuza gangsters to do their dirty work. There’s also a serious new disease, Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, with no known cure. The Johnny of the title is a mnemonic courier, someone who physically transports important data from place to place by embedding it in their brain. He needs to do one last job before retiring.
In a Beijing hotel he uploads 320G of “data” from a small group of renegade scientists employed by the Pharmakom medical corporation, to be delivered to Newark, New Jersey. The 320G is significant because it has overloaded Johnny’s capacity, and he will die if the data is not downloaded soon. In what will be a recurring plot element, heavily armed thugs who want to prevent the data being released kill the scientists and attempt to kill Johnny. During the fight, three images, the “Access Code” needed to download the data, are partly lost.
Johnny arrives in Newark, where the same people try to kill him again. He is rescued by the other lead character, Jane, a bodyguard who comes to his aid on the promise of lots of money. On the run from an ever-increasing number of people trying to find and kill them, Johnny and Jane fall in with the LoTeks, resistance fighters who hack into corporate networks and release information that corporations want to keep secret. (The LoTeks themselves are not against technology, but their chosen lifestyle restricts them to using what they can scavenge rather than being lavishly equipped with the latest and greatest.)
Johnny learns in quick succession that Jane has early onset NAS symptoms and that the “data” locked up in his head is a cure for NAS. As a cyberpunk corporation, Pharmakom is naturally keeping it secret just to make more money. Without the full access code, the only hope to extract the data is Jones, a cybernetically enhanced dolphin working with the LoTeks. After a last climactic battle, Johnny with the help of Jones is able to “hack his own brain” and recover the data, the cure is released to the world, and Johnny and Jane can live somewhat more happily (this is cyberpunk) ever after.
Johnny Mnemonic (in this review always referring to the film, not the short story, unless stated otherwise) is packed with interfaces, of which the most interesting and memorable is an extended cyberspace scene around the middle. Like the gestural interface of Minority Report, it is a wonderfully, almost obsessively, detailed imagining of the near future. The value of these predictions, as with most science fiction, is not whether they were correct or not. Predictions are much more interesting for what they tell us about the hopes, expectations, and dreams at the time they were made. Johnny Mnemonic, made in 1995 and set in 2021, shows us how the Internet and World Wide Web were expected to develop over the next twenty five years. As I write this, there’s five years to go.
The opening shot of Johnny Mnemonic is a brightly coloured 3D graphical environment. It looks like an abstract cityscape, with buildings arranged in rectangular grid and various 3D icons or avatars flying around. Text identifies this as the Internet of 2021, now cyberspace.
Strictly speaking this shot is not an interface. It is a visualization from the point of view of a calendar wake up reminder, which flies through cyberspace, then down a cable, to appear on a wall mounted screen in Johnny’s hotel suite. However, we will see later on that this is exactly the same graphical representation used by humans. As the very first scene of the film, it is important in establishing what the Internet looks like in this future world. It’s therefore worth discussing the “look” employed here, even though there isn’t any interaction.
Cyberspace is usually equated with 3D graphics and virtual reality in particular. Yet when you look into what is necessary to implement cyberspace, the graphics really aren’t that important.
MUDs and MOOs: ASCII Cyberspace
People have been building cyberspaces since the 1980s in the form of MUDs and MOOs. At first sight these look like old style games such as Adventure or Zork. To explore a MUD/MOO, you log on remotely using a terminal program. Every command and response is pure text, so typing “go north” might result in “You are in a church.” The difference between MUD/MOOs and Zork is that these are dynamic multiuser virtual worlds, not solitary-player games. Other people share the world with you and move through it, adventuring, building, or just chatting. Everyone has an avatar and every place has an appearance, but expressed in text as if you were reading a book.
guest>>@go #1914 Castle entrance A cold and dark gatehouse, with moss-covered crumbling walls. A passage gives entry to the forbidding depths of Castle Aargh. You hear a strange bubbling sound and an occasional chuckle. Obvious exits: path to Castle Aargh (#1871) enter to Bridge (#1916)
Most impressive of all, these are virtual worlds with built-in editing capabilities. All the “graphics” are plain text, and all the interactions, rules, and behaviours are programmed in a scripting language. The command line interface allows the equivalent of Emacs or VI to run, so the world and everything in itcan be modified in real time by the participants. You don’t even have to restart the program. Here a character creates a new location within a MOO, to the “south” of the existing Town Square:
laranzu>>@dig MyNewHome laranzu>> @describe here as “A large and spacious cave full of computers” laranzu>> @dig north to Town Square
The simplicity of the text interfaces leads people to think these are simple systems. They’re not. These cyberspaces have many of the legal complexities found in the real world. Can individuals be excluded from particular places? What can be done about abusive speech? How offensive can your public appearance be? Who is allowed to create new buildings, or modify existing ones? Is attacking an avatar a crime? Many 3D virtual reality system builders never progress that far, stopping when the graphics look good and the program rarely crashes. If you’re interested in cyberspace interface design, a long running textual cyberspace such as LambdaMOO or DragonMUD holds a wealth of experience about how to deal with all these messy human issues.
So why all the graphics?
So it turns out MUDs and MOOs are a rich, sprawling, complex cyberspace in text. Why then, in 1995, did we expect cyberspace to require 3D graphics anyway?
The 1980s saw two dimensional graphical user interfaces become well known with the Macintosh, and by the 1990s they were everywhere. The 1990s also saw high end 3D graphics systems becoming more common, the most prominent being from Silicon Graphics. It was clear that as prices came down personal computers would soon have similar capabilities.
At the time of Johnny Mnemonic, the world wide web had brought the Internet into everyday life. If web browsers with 2D GUIs were superior to the command line interfaces of telnet, FTP, and Gopher, surely a 3D cyberspace would be even better? Predictions of a 3D Internet were common in books such as Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold and magazines such as Wired at the time. VRML, the Virtual Reality Markup/Modeling Language, was created in 1995 with the expectation that it would become the foundation for cyberspace, just as HTML had been the foundation of the world wide web.
Twenty years later, we know this didn’t happen. The solution to the unthinkable complexity of cyberspace was a return to the command line interface in the form of a Google search box.
Abstract or symbolic interfaces such as text command lines may look more intimidating or complicated than graphical systems. But if the graphical interface isn’t powerful enough to meet their needs, users will take the time to learn how the more complicated system works. And we’ll see later on that the cyberspace of Johnny Mnemonic is not purely graphical and does allow symbolic interaction.
