Loki’s glaive: Teleconferencing

21 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

When his battalion of thralls are up and ~~harvesting Vespene Gas~~ working to stabilize the Tesseract, Loki sits down to check in with his boss’ two-thumbed assistant, an MCU-recurring weirdo who goes unnamed in the movie, but which the Marvel wiki assures me is called The Other.

To get into the teleconference, Loki sits down on the ground with the glaive in his right hand and the blue stone roughly in front of his heart. He closes his eyes, straightens his back, and as the stone glows, the walls around him seem to billow away and he sees the asteroidal meeting room where The Other has been on hold (listening to some annoying Chitauri Muzak no doubt).

The Other does not see the Loki sitting on the ground in MCU-prime (MCU-1°). Instead, he addresses the avatar of Loki (in MCU-2°) which appears with a cyan projection-ray flourish, in Asgardian costume. In addition to the alteration of his appearance, the glaive looks different. It is much taller and thinner, and its blades more pronounced in this projection, i.e. looking more like a real scepter.

Now, that’s a scepter.

From an interface standpoint, there is one thing to note and four questions for this interface.

Nota Bene

Note the modification of appearances. The teleconference could have worked like a video camera, showing Loki cross-legged on the floor. In the Make It So book I argued that advanced communication systems should interpret, not just report, and that’s what the glaive is doing here. The altered appearance is better for Loki since he needs to project an air of authority and command in the situation, and the regal accoutrements helps him do that. If only we knew how he selected the outfit. Was there some system setup? Is it just the default? Is this mystically how he sees himself? Of course The Other knows he’s looking at a representation and isn’t completely buying into it, but how much worse for Loki would this meeting gone if he showed up like a schlub?

Questions that need answering before it can really be evaluated.

One: What do others around MCU-1° Loki see. How do thralls know he’s in teleconference? That’s important so they know not to interrupt him unless it’s really important. My guess is the glowing crystal. Between that and Loki’s closed eyes, any onlooker could suss out that he was in a call. (For comparison/contrast, I noted a similar signal in The Fifth Element headsets.)

Two: What’s the degree of immersion. Can teleconference Loki hear anything in MCU-1°? If so how does he know which universe a given sound comes from? If MCU-1° is softened, what’s the threshold by which it is let through? Can a thrall yell to get his attention? If MCU-1° is completely muted enemies would have a massive advantage over him while in teleconference.

Three: How does he control the avatar? In MCU-1°, he’s seated and unmoving, so let’s presume it’s a control-by-mind interface. Certainly quite a natural control mechanism (with a perfectly mapped interface).

Finally: How does he control the interface? If the system is perfectly immersive, he needs some set of escape codes to tell the interface, “I want to leave this teleconference now,” or “Paused to humiliate a thrall,” or “No bars, let me call you back.” He might be able to do it with thought, of course, but it might be more useful to imagine a gesture or spoken command to do the same.

Sadly, we don’t get to see how we does this, because the Other bullies him out of the conference with a mean gesture: The Other pushes his hand against Loki’s head and *poof* he’s suddenly out of conference. And while Loki’s movements in MCU-2° don’t require his movement in MCU-1°, his MCU-1° head does move after being shoved by the Other’s gesture.

That’s an awesome narrative moment to show the audience that Loki has made a deal with some guys more powerful than him and who show him no respect. As powerful as he is, he might be out of his depths, and the stakes are real.

Loki’s glaive: Enthrallment

19 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Several times throughout the movie, Loki uses places the point of the glaive on a victim’s chest near their heart, and a blue fog passes from the stone to infect them: an electric blackness creeps upward along their skin from their chest until it reaches their eyes, which turn fully black for a moment before becoming the same ice blue of the glaive’s stone, and we see that the victim is now enthralled into Loki’s servitude.

The glaive is very, very terribly designed for this purpose.

It freaks the victim out (or should, anyway)

Look at that damned thing. It looks like an elven shiv. A can opener for human flesh. When a victim sees it coming, he will reasonably presume it’s going to split them like a fresh-caught fish, and do whatever he or she can to flail away from it. See how Loki has to grab Hawkeye by the wrist? That’s because short of some sort of hypnosis, Hawkeye would not just stand there like that with Orcrist slicing towards his sternum. We have to backworld some sort of pre-enthrallment mind effect to explain why he’s not jerking in the other direction. As all great propaganda and persuasion masters know, you can’t approach as a threat, or the victim’s fight-or-flight might kick in and slam that window shut for winning their hearts and minds.

It might, in fact, slice the target open

Even if there’s some mystical roofie thing going on to calm the victim, if Loki had too much force behind his approach, or someone bumped either of them, the glaive could go into the victim, causing a shock of pain that might wake them up before the enthrallment could take place. Or worse, it could actually damage the heart and kill the victim, which is counter to Loki’s goal.

It requires precision, control, and time

To avoid the disheartening of an intended victim, then, Loki has to grab them, momentarily hypnotize them into calmness, and carefully ease the thing up to the target, and hold it and them in place for a few. Imagine a button on a keyboard that had to be touched with feather pressure, or it would brick the machine. This would not be a great keyboard. All these are expensive dependencies, and the time it takes is time for onlookers to intervene (or to somehow incapacitate the victim to save them.)

It tips its hand

OK, fine, the glowing-blue eyes might be an unavoidable side effect of the “tech”—and yes, I understand it’s very valuable narrative purpose to signal enthrallment—but if you were designing an enthrallment tech, you’d want to avoid such an obvious “tell,” especially right there in the main location people target when looking at other people.

A redesign

So there are a lot of ways this is less than ideal. Fortunately we don’t have to call iGlaive and tell them to shutter operations. I think we can fix this in one of a few ways.

Soften the industrial design? No.

The glaive needs to stay looking evil, and being sharp and pointy helps with that.

1. Have the glaive pull them in

A cinematic hack might be to visually imply that the glaive helps with these problems. Imagine Loki approaching Hawkeye with the glaive outstretched, and the blue fog appears and pulls Hawkeye towards its point. The point of contact can glow slightly, implying some protection, and the crystal can glow to do its enthralling. Now it’s a feature, not a bug.

2. Go broadside

If for some plot or cinematic reason that wouldn’t work, you could have Loki use the broad side of the glaive against the chest of the person. Slapping it like an oar onto someone would be a fast gesture that wouldn’t need a lot of precision to get the crystal near the heart. It could even enable sneakier attacks from the side. It might prove cinematically problematic when enthralling a female character, but since that doesn’t happen on screen in The Avengers, it’s moot.

3. A new gesture

If Loki isn’t the broadside sort, you could keep the staff the same and redesign the gesture. The mind is the thing enthralled, so it’s tempting to have it located on a forehead or neck, but we can’t have Loki gesturing to the victim’s head, because then we lose the awesome moment near the climax when Loki tries and fails to enthrall Stark on his chest reactor. So let’s keep it cardiac. Maybe we can change the relationship of the glaive to the victim.

Imagine if he lays the glaive across his left forearm, (or better: cuts into his own skin, which would explain why he just doesn’t keep enthralling everyone in sight) which begins to glow with the blue fog, and he uses a pointing index finger to tap the victim’s heart. A finger-to-sternum interaction would telegraph a lot less danger, risk fewer victims’ lives, and enable speed with less apparent precision required. As above, it might be problematic to enthrall a woman without the audience going OMG BOOBS, but again, we’re saved from that problem by the script.

In many ways this is my favorite of the redesigns. It’s a Natural User Interface. With blue fog.

Any of those tweaks might help us believe in the interaction and useful for us to keep in mind: requiring great precision of our users only slows them down and keeps them focused on the interface rather than their goals.

Loki’s glaive: Projectile gestures

14 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE PRONE TO SEIZURES, this is not the post for you. In fact, you can just read the text and be quit of it. The more neurologically daring of you can press “MORE,” but you have been forewarned.

If the first use of Loki’s glaive is as a melée weapon, the second use is of a projectile weapon. Loki primes it, it glows fiercely blue-white, and then he fires it with usually-deadly accuracy to the sorrow of his foes.

This blog is not interested in the details of the projectile, but what is interesting is the interface by which he primes and fires it. How does he do it? Let’s look. He fires the thing 8 times over the course of the movie. What do we see there?

Priming

At first I thought there was no priming mechanism, or that it was invisible. After all, we don’t see him squeeze it or anything. But braving the gifs I noticed that there is a gesture that precedes the glow, and that’s his expression. He gets haterface right before he fires. The only time we can’t verify it is when he’s not looking at the camera. Which is a nifty realization that the firing mechanism is an affective interface—a brain interface capable of deducing emotion.

Firing

If that’s how he primes it, loading the chamber so to speak, how does he launch it? Most of the time he fires it, he does this gesture thing, where he kind of slams the projectile away: With the glaive pointed forward in his right hand, he cocks his left arm back and then in one fast jerk, he pulls the glaive back and thrusts his left hand forward towards the target, counterbalancing the weight and sending the Magic Missile to do its nefarious work.

But then there’s this fight with Thor atop Stark tower, and for one particularly dancy move he spins around, lays the glaive across his shoulders until it’s pointed at his brother, and it fires. There’s no cocking back or counterbalancing. It just goes.

So what’s going on there? Well, it’s not clear, but at the very least it means that the thing is responding to something other than his usual gesture. We can’t see his face, so it’s Occam-logical that it’s affective, i.e. responding to his haterface again.

Ok, then, what’s all the dramatic gesture for throughout the rest of the film? Well, I think Stark said it best when he explained that, “Loki is a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers. He wants parades.” He must dance his hate, and the glaive lets him do that. Better him than Thanos, I guess.

Note that in this way the glaive serves a humane purpose similar to what Ruby Rhod’s staff does for him: it allows him to express his abundance of personality. I’m poking a bit of fun, but in all seriousness I’m quite fond of expressive technology, of things that let us do more than do, and convey a bit of who we are.

It’s nice to see that in a sci-fi interface. Even if it’s a deadly alien weapon.

Usually he’s all…

A figure wearing a dark outfit raises a glowing weapon, emitting light in a smoky environment.

A character in a dark, futuristic setting uses a bright light device while engaging in a dynamic action scene, with illuminated panels in the background.

But this one time he’s all…

Loki’s glaive

12 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

When Loki materializes on the dais, he is holding one the key objects to The Avengers and indeed the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe multi-franchise Infinity Stones plot. What is it?

NIck Fury calls the thing a spear. Others call it a staff. The official Disney wiki calls it the Chitauri Sceptre, but this thing is very much a tool. Over this and the next several posts, I’ll talk about how it is used alternately as the following.

A melée weapon
A projectile weapon
A bad-mojo radiator
A teleconferencing device
An enthrallment knife

Notably, in no scene does he carry it on a ceremonial occasion as a symbol of sovereignty, so scepter really doesn’t fit our purposes. What does? Well, any RPG fan worth their Deck of Many Things knows that the blades-on-a-stick category of weapons are many and nuanced. Finding a perfect term is tough since historians and medievalists have categorized other pole arms according to their construction and function, and none of them are quite like this one.

So though it hurts to let go of possibilities like falx, svärdstav, or bohemian earspoon—and also because I apparently hate the SEO that would earn me all the millions—I think the thing fits most readily into the category of glaive, since glaives are defined as a single-edged (I know, but it’s not quite double-edged either) slicing pole arm with a piercing tip. Like this one. So debate the choice in the comments if you must, but you’ll have to be pretty convincing since I’ve already written and scheduled the other posts and I have a lot to do in the UK at UX London over the next weeks.

And of course recognizing it as a glaive also gives us an opportunity for this joke.

J.D.E.M. LEVEL 5

8 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The first computer interface we see in the film occurs at 3:55. It’s an interface for housing and monitoring the tesseract, a cube that is described in the film as “an energy source” that S.H.I.E.L.D. plans to use to “harness energy from space.” We join the cube after it has unexpectedly and erratically begun to throw off low levels of gamma radiation.

The harnessing interface consists of a housing, a dais at the end of a runway, and a monitoring screen.

Avengers-cubemonitoring-07 — Fury walks past the dais they erected *just because*.

The housing & dais

The harness consists of a large circular housing that holds the cube and exposes one face of it towards a long runway that ends in a dais. Diegetically this is meant to be read more as engineering than interface, but it does raise questions. For instance, if they didn’t already know it was going to teleport someone here, why was there a dais there at all, at that exact distance, with stairs leading up to it? How’s that harnessing energy? Wouldn’t you expect a battery at the far end? If they did expect a person as it seems they did, then the whole destroying swaths of New York City thing might have been avoided if the runway had ended instead in the Hulk-holding cage that we see later in the film. So…you know…a considerable flaw in their unknown-passenger teleportation landing strip design. Anyhoo, the housing is also notable for keeping part of the cube visible to users near it, and holding it at a particular orientation, which plays into the other component of the harness—the monitor.

The monitor

In the underground laboratory, an (unnamed?) technician warns lead scientist Selvig that, “it’s spiking again,” and the camera pans down to this monitoring interface.

Header

The header is a static barcode followed by the initialism J.D.E.M. along with its full name, the Joint Dark Energy Mission. (Sounds super cool and sci-fi, right? Turns out it is a real program between NASA and the US DOE.) Another label across the top identifies the screen as LEVEL 5 and that it belongs to PROJECT PEGASUS and NASA.

3D map

A main display shows a 3D wireframe of the tesseract, with color-coded nebula-like shapes within the cube. The wireframe (and most of the text on screen) are a bright cyan, with internal features progressing in color from the cyan through white to a blood red, all the way to lens flares near the most active areas in the cube. The color choices make for a quick read of what is “cool” and what is “hot,” so are effective for being immediate, but if the lens flares are designed into the system to indicate peakness, it’s a bad choice for obscuring other data in the display.

Note that the wireframe of the cube is also rotating slightly, which is very helpful for a user to more fully understand 3D information from a 2D screen. It might be even better mapping with less cognitive load if the display was a volumetric projection. (VPs exist within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but so far I believe we’ve only ever seen them in Tony Stark’s possession so perhaps he has not released it to the outside world.) Hopefully in its rotation on this monitor it does not rotate in 360°, as the regularness of the cube would make it difficult to understand where an internal anomaly might exist in the real thing. Hopefully the wireframe only wavers back and forth within a few degrees, and is oriented in roughly the same way an observer glancing at the real thing would see it in the housing, to allow for instant mapping of problem areas.

Warning

Just to the left of the 3D map is a data monitoring panel. Its top label blinks a red WARNING CRITICAL ENERGY LEVELS and a percentage readout. The panel also features a key whose colors match those of the map. (As it should.) Hopefully a microinteraction allows a user to touch any part of the map, freeze the rotation, and get the percentage details of the touched point. A detail box wavers its vertical position along the key to provide a user a quick assessment of its value, and also contains a percentage readout for precision. Judging by the position of the box and the readout, it looks like the 100% mark is about halfway up the screen. Hopefully the upper part of the scale is logarithmic to accommodate massive surges in values.

Additional elements of the display include several scrolling waveforms and text boxes with inscrutable data and labels. It’s easy to imagine these as useful (say total energy values for specific electromagnetic frequencies) but they’re difficult to read, so difficult to formally evaluate.

All told, a nice display (per some assumptions) for monitoring what’s happening with the cube.

Now if only they had applied that solid design thinking to that dais vs. cage problem.

The Avengers (2013): Overview

6 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Release date: 4 May 2013, United States

As with all overviews, ALL THE SPOILERS ahead.

A mysterious alien artifact called the Tesseract summons the Asgardian god Loki to the Earth, where he uses a powerful staff to either kill or enthrall several S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives before stealing the Tesseract and making his escape with them. The head of S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury, gains permission from a shadowy council to assemble a team of superheroes (Iron Man, Bruce Banner, Black Widow, and Captain America) code named The Avengers Initiative to help capture Loki and recover the Tesseract. They find and capture him in Berlin but his operatives get away with a cache of rare metals. Loki’s brother Thor shows up to claim him but after fighting Iron Man and Captain America, Thor agrees to let Loki remain captured in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s helicarrier.

Loki’s operatives trace him and sabotage the helicarrier to free him as Banner becomes the Hulk and goes on a rampage through the vessel. Through fierce combat and resourcefulness, the helicarrier is saved from crashing, but Loki escapes with his staff.

In New York City Loki’s operatives use the metals they stole and the Tesseract to create an interdimensional gate through which he summons an alien army. Though the Avengers mount a strong defense of the city, the shadowy council orders a nuclear strike on the city to destroy the alien army. Iron Man intercepts the missile, flies it through the portal into the alien mothership, disabling the invaders em masse before falling back through the portal to Earth.

At the resolution of the film, Thor returns to Asgard with Loki and the Tesseract and the staff remains on Earth. Also the team enjoys some shawarma.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0848228/Currently streaming on:

Watch a supercut of every user interface from The Avengers (2013)

28 Apr 2015 by Christopher Noessel

With the reviews of Oblivion behind us, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron upon us in a matter of days, I thought it would be good to review the movie that canonized Joss Whedon into Hollywood sainthood so hard they had to retcon Catholicism into the timeline so this joke could happen.

Here it is, a supercut of every user interface in The Avengers (2013).

Boy there are some amazing interfaces in there. Got any favorites?

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

Category Archives: ~ Marvel Cinematic Universe