Iron Man HUD: A Breakdown

1 Jul 2015 by Christopher Noessel

So this is going to take a few posts. You see, the next interface that appears in The Avengers is a video conference between Tony Stark in his Iron Man supersuit and his partner in romance and business, Pepper Potts, about switching Stark Tower from the electrical grid to their independent power source. Here’s what a still from the scene looks like.

So on the surface of this scene, it’s a communications interface.

But that chat exists inside of an interface with a conceptual and interaction framework that has been laid down since the original Iron Man movie in 2008, and built upon with each sequel, one in 2010 and one in 2013. (With rumors aplenty for a fourth one…sometime.)

So to review the video chat, I first have to talk about the whole interface, and that has about 6 hours of prologue occurring across 4 years of cinema informing it. So let’s start, as I do with almost every interface, simply by describing it and its components.

Exosuit

The Iron Man is the name of the series of superpowered exosuits designed by Tony Stark. They range from the Mark I, a comparatively crude suit of armor to escape imprisonment by terrorists, through the Mark XLVI, the armor seen in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The suit acts as defense against nearly every type of weapon known. It has repulsor beams built into the palms and in later models the arc reactor mounted in the chest that can be used to deliver concussive force. It allows the wearer to fly. Offensive weaponry varies between models, but has included a high powered laser system, and auto-targeting minigun pod and missiles. The suit can act semi-autonomously or via remote control. One of the models in The Avengers has parts that are seen to self-propel to Tony, targeting a beacon bracelet he wears, and self-assemble around him very quickly.

Immersive display

Though Tony’s head is completely covered, he has a virtual reality display within his helmet. It is a full-field-of-vision, very high-resolution, full-color display that provides stereoscopic imaging. It allows Tony to see the world around him as if he were not wearing the helmet, augment the view with goal-, person-, location-, and object-sensitive awareness.

The display varies a great deal, changing to the needs of the situation. But five icons persistently in the lower part of the display seem to be: suit status, targeting and optics, radar, artificial horizon, and map.

An interpretive view of Tony’s experience, from Iron Man (2008). — An interpretive view of Tony’s experience, from *Iron Man* (2008).

An first-person view from within the HUD, Iron Man (2008). — An first-person view from within the HUD, *Iron Man* (2008).

There is much to critique about the readability of the complex layering and translucency, the limits of human perception, and the necessarily- (and strictly-) interpretive nature of what we as audience see, but let me save those three points for a later post. For now it’s enough to log the features as aspects of the system.

Head NUI

Though Tony could use his hands to interact with an interface projected into the augmented reality view around him, his hands are often occupied in controlling flight or in combat. For this reason the means of input are head gesture, eye gesture, and voice input. A bit more on each follows.

Elements within the HUD such as reticles around his eyes follow and track his head gestures. Other elements stay locked in place. The HUD can track his gaze perfectly, allowing him to designate targets for his weapons with a fixation. Using this perfect eye tracking, Tony can also speak about something he is looking at, either in the real world or in the interface, and the system understands exactly what he’s talking about.

In fact, Tony is able to speak fully natural language commands, and indeed, carry out full-Turing conversations with the suit because of the presence of…

Strong artificial intelligence: JARVIS

An on-board artificial intelligence known as JARVIS handles any information task Tony asks of it, and monitors the surroundings and anticipates informational needs. There is strong evidence that most of the functions of the suit are handled by JARVIS behind the scenes. The crucialness of the artificial intelligence to the function of the suit cannot be overstated. It’s difficult to imagine how most of the suit could function as it does without an artificial intelligence behind the scenes facilitating results and even guiding Tony. With this in mind it is instructive to reframe the AI as the thing being named the Iron Man, with Tony Stark being an onboard manager, or, more charitably, a command-and-control center. Who quips.

Next up in the Iron HUD series: Lets review the functions of the suit.

Abidjan Operation

25 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

After Hawkeye is enthralled by Loki, agent Coulson has to call agent Romanoff in from the field, mid-mission. While he awaits her to extract herself from a situation, he idly glances at case file 242-56 which consists of a large video of Barton and Romanoff mid-combat, and overview profiles of the two agents. A legend in the upper right identifies this as STRIKE TEAM: DELTA, and a label at the top reads ABIDJAN OPERATION. There is some animated fuigetry on the periphery of the video, and some other fuigetry in windows that are occluded by the case file.

Some things to note.

The four windows seem to be connected by content and by case file designation. But each has separate window controls in the upper right hand corner. (Not an aberration, we saw the same thing in Carrier Control.) If it’s a single case file, the layout ought to be handled automatically to save Coulson (or agent Stephen Morton, who appears per the text in the upper left to be the one actually logged in), from all that file management. It would even avoid the “error” of Barton’s profile being obscured by Romanoff’s, as in the image.
There are bar codes displayed on the agent profiles. Why would a computer operator need barcodes on a computer screen?
There is a miniature 3D rendering of a screw to the right of each of their portraits.
There are also three hexagrams from the I Ching on Romanoff’s profile. Each one of these is Ch’ien The Creative, which makes sense, she’s total Yang. Barton’s hexagrams are obscured by an overlap of her profile, but I really think it would be a lovely compliment if his were K’un The Receptive, or Yin. Also, OK, kind of weird that SHIELD would use the I Ching as part of official policy, but hey, crazier things have happened.
There is a snippet of text from a document about the fundamentals of lossy image compression in the background. It kind of makes sense given that there is clearly some face recognition going on in the video.
It must be hi-tech, as the container rule lines jog about semi-randomly. Nurnies to be sure.
The video controls along the bottom of the actual video are repeated in miniature along the bottom of the profile pictures, even though these profile images do not move. (Though if they were more like looping photographs in Harry Potter, that would have been cooler.)
Abidjan, you might know, is a large city on the Ivory Coast but the coordinates on the screen put this scene in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea. Which, though it’s 894 km east of Abidjan, is actually closer that I would have guessed it to be.

Iron Welding

23 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Cut to the bottom of the Hudson River where some electrical “transmission lines” rest. Tony in his Iron Man supersuit has his palm-mounted repulsor rays configured such that they create a focused beam, capable of cutting through an iron pipe to reveal power cables within. Once the pipe casing is removed, he slides a circular device onto the cabling. The cuff automatically closes, screws itself tight, and expands to replace the section of casing. Dim white lights burn brighter as hospital-green rings glow brightly around the cable’s circumference. His task done, he underwater-flies away, flying up the southern tip of Manhattan to Stark Tower.

It’s quick scene that sets up the fact that they’re using Tony’s arc reactor technology to liberate Stark Tower from the electrical grid (incidentally implying that the Avengers will never locate a satellite headquarters anywhere in Florida. Sorry, Jeb.) So, since it’s a quick scene, we can just skip the details and interaction design issues, right?

Of course not. You know better from this blog.

The Lines

In case you were planning on living out some elaborate cosplay fantasy to remake this scene, be aware that subsea cables don’t just sit like that inside of an air-filled pipe, waiting for a leak to short circuit the power grid. The conductive cabling is surrounded by thick plastic insulation. Even the notion of pipes underwater might have been a thing years ago, but modern subsea casings are steel cables embedded in the same insulation. But whatever, we don’t need that for the story.

A dark scene featuring a robotic head illuminated by beams of light, with water droplets in the air, showcasing a sci-fi atmosphere.

Close-up of a robotic helmet with glowing eyes, surrounded by beams of light and fine particles in a dark environment.

Cuffing

The cuff interaction is awesome. All Tony has to do to is roughly slide it in position, and then the thing does the rest. The shape and actuators make it so he can place it roughly in the right place, and it does what it needs to do. That might have been overengineered for a single-use device, but whatever, he’s Tony Stark. He might have engineered it over breakfast, and he might already have made a handful for his other buidlings.

Cuff

The cuff itself is less awesome. If you were a high-profile billionaire inventor superhero putting a device in a place that’s difficult to monitor and connected directly to the electrical systems of your headquarters would you let it glow? Sure, that makes it easy to find later, but that means it’s easy for any supervillain to find, too. Much better is to camouflage it in the original pipe and keep its location secret from malefactors. Bad Tony. No glow.

Welding

The welding looks problematic for a couple of reasons. Does the “arc” have a fixed focal length? If so, how does he know what that length is and when he’s straying from it? We can presume it auto-adjusts using some welding subroutine of his on-board artificial intelligence, JARVIS. Then it becomes an issue of aiming. Try this: tape a three-inch pencil perpendicularly to your palm, and then try and fill out a crossword puzzle. Not exactly precise.

But using a bit of apologetics, let’s presume that he’s not using a tool so much as positioning the tool that JARVIS uses. JARVIS can use cameras situated around the suit and perfect 3D modeling to continually adjust the focus and positioning of the repulsor beam to target wherever it is that Tony is looking. Perfectly reasonable given what we know about the technology in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and moreover, the way it ought to work for its user. He uses the thing his body is expert in, i.e. looking, to guide an agent that takes care of all the details he’s not good at, i.e. controlling the repulsor beam to cut into the pipe at a precise depth. Now it’s not problematic. It’s awesome.

Carrier Control

11 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The second instantiation of videochat with the World Security Council that we see is when Fury receives their order to bomb the site of the Chitauri portal. (Here’s the first.) He takes this call on the bridge, and rather than a custom hardware setup, this is a series of windows that overlay an ominous-red map of the world in an app called CARRIER CONTROL. These windows represent a built-in chat feature for discussing this very topic. There is some fuigetry on the periphery, but our focus is on these windows and the conversation happening through them.

In this version of the chat, we are assured that it is a SECURE TRANSMISSION by a legend across the top of each, but there is not the same level of assurance as in the videoconference room. If it’s still HOTP, Fury isn’t notified of it. There’s a tiny 01_AZ in the upper right of every screen, but it never changes and is the same for each participant. (An homage to Arizona? Lighter Andrew Zink? Cameraman Arthur Zajac?) Though this is a more desperate situation, you imagine that the need for security is no less dire. Having that same cypher key would be comforting if it is in fact a policy.

Different sizes of windows in the app seem to indicate a hierarchy, since the largest window is the fellow who does most of the talking in both conferences, and it does not change as others speak. Such an automated layout would spare Fury the hassle of having to manage multiple windows, though visually these look more like individual objects he’s meant to manipulate. Poor affordances.

The only control we see is when Fury dismisses them, and to do this he just taps at the middle of the screen. The teleconference window is “push wiped” by a satellite view of New York City. Fine, he feels like punching them. But…

a) How does he actually select something in that interface without a tap?

b) A swipe would have been more meaningful, and in line with the gestural pidgin I identified in the gestural chapter of the book.

And of course, if this was the real world, you’d hope for better affordances for what can be done on this window across the board.

So though mostly effective, narratively, could use some polish.

Shadowy videoconferencing room

10 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

After Loki gets away with the crazy-powerful tesseract and a handful of S.H.I.E.L.D. (seriously that’s a pain to type) agents, Fury has a virtual meeting with members of the World Security Council—which is shadowy in appearance and details. To conduct this furtive conference Fury walks into a room custom-built for such purposes.

A bank of large vertically-mounted monitors forms a semicircle in the small room, each mounted above a workstation with keyboard and multiple screens overlit for maximum eyestrain. It’s quite unclear what the agents who normally work here are currently doing, or what those vertically mounted screens normally display, since they’d be a shoo-in for an OSHA lawsuit, given the amount a user would need to crane. Ergonomics, Nick, look it up.

Each screen dedicates most of its real estate to a waist-up view of the speaker. Overlays near the bottom assure us that DATA [is] SECURE and confirms it with a 16-character alphanumeric CYPHER KEY that is frequently changing and unique to each speaker. This is similar to an HMAC-based One-time Password Algorithm (HOTP) password algorithm, so is well-grounded in reality. It’s convincing.

The screens adhere to the trope that every screen is a camera. Nick looks at their eyes and they look right back. Ordinarily that would be a big problem, but with the translucent displays and the edge lighting of the participants, it could actually work.

There is no indication of controls for these screens, but that’s cool if the room is dedicated to this purpose. Someone else would set the call up for him, and all he has to do is walk in. He should be able to just walk out to end it. And let them know how he feels about them.

Portal Monitor

4 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

After Loki has enthralled Selvig, enthralled-Hawkeye lets Loki know that, “This place is about to blow and drop a hundred feet of rock on us.” Selvig looks to the following screen and confirms, “He’s right. The portal is collapsing in on itself.”

This is perhaps one of the most throwaway screens in the film, given the low-rez twisty graphics that could be out of Lawnmower Man, its only-vague-resemblance to the portal itself…

c.f.

…the text box of wildly scrolling and impossible to read pink code with what looks like a layer of white code hastily slapped over it, and—notably—no trendline of data that would help Selvig quickly identify this Very Important Fact. Maybe he’s such a portal whisperer that he can just see it, but why show the screens rather than show him looking up to the blue thing itself?

There might be some other data on the left of this bank of screens seen a few seconds later in the background…

…but it has more red text overlays, so I’m disinclined to give it the blurry benefit of the doubt.

Fair enough, this is there merely to establish Selvig’s enthrallment, and the scientific certainty of the stakes for the next beat. But, we see his eyes, and the certainty is evidenced by everything collapsing. We don’t need scientific assurance. If the designers were not given time to make it passable, I wish that the beat had been handled without a view of the screens rather than shaky-cam.

Loki’s glaive: In summary

2 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

So we’ve seen how the glaive works as…

A fine melee weapon
A haterface-triggered (and drama-tolerant) projectile weapon
A crappy, crappy enthrallment knife
A (hopefully) proximity-triggered bad mojo radiator

On the Twitters Patrick Kovacich made some convincing arguments that the glaive wasn’t really involved in the teleconferencing as much as it was an astral projection by Loki himself, though that raises questions about why it glows so white-hot right as he’s entering the teleconference. So, for arguments’ sake let’s leave it in, but I acknowledge the evidence against is quite compelling if less instructive.

A man dressed in black points a gun forward, illuminated by a blue light, with a determined expression amidst a smoky background.

A scene featuring a character dressed in dark armor holding a glowing blue object, engaging with a man in a suit with a NASA badge, set in a futuristic, industrial environment.

So, with these subtopics covered, let’s turn back to the total question of the glaive: How is it as an interface for these functions? Let’s return to the three values that I hold every show up to: believability, narrative, and as a model for real world interactions.

Believability (the sci)

Can we believe that the glaive can work the way it does within the bounds of the story? There is the major failing of the pointy enthrallment knife, which can’t work unless you tell the actors to shut up and stand there.

What else? Given its category of ”magic technological artifact” it’s hard to ding it for what it does. But one place we would look is to see if there were any conflicts between how he activates its various functions and how it signals to him that those functions are in use.

	Input	Output
Melee weapon	Physical force	N/A
Projectile Weapon	Haterface/affective	Level 9000 magic missile
Enthrallment Knife	Touch	Blue fog & thrall eyes
Mojo radiator	Geofence + proximity	Stealth
Mystic Polycom	Alpha state	Bright white glow

Turns out none of these things conflict. So, sure, in a world where magical technology can make these things happen, it’s internally consistent and believable that Loki could manage these inputs and outputs without confusion.

Narrative (the fi)

It’s not a Macguffin. The glaive fits into the story, conveying why Loki would want it, how it enables his plans, and why he needs to not lose it. Visually, it conveys its wickedness with the physical design and the power via that blue, glowing gem stone (that, without too many spoilers, becomes even more important in Age of Ultron). So narratively—including that one hilarious Stark tower scene—it does its many jobs well.

Model (the interface)

So, if we had to create a glaive with all these abilities, would we create it that way? With the exception of the terrible enthrallment aspects, it’s a well-designed device for field marshal tasks: brawling, distance attacks, looking menacing, keeping in touch with leadership, but wait—don’t answer yet, because—it comes equipped with a lojack that should rightly terrify thieves, even if it doesn’t directly deter them. For a comic book movie weapon, it’s a pretty good piece of work.

Loki’s glaive: Mojo Radiator

26 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Loki’s wants to take down the Avengers and the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, to disable the two greatest threats to his invading forces. To accomplish this, he lets himself get captured and the glaive taken away from him, knowing Banner would study it, fall prey to one of its terrible effects, become the ragemonster, and wreck the place.

That effect goes unnamed in the film so I’ll call it the bad mojo radiator. The longer people hang around it, the more discord it sows. In fact just before Loki’s thralls enact a daring rescue of him, we see all of the Avengers fighting in the lab, for no other reason than they stand in the glaive’s presence.

The infighting ends suddenly when Banner unintentionally takes the glaive in hand as he attempts to silence the group. Because the threat of Hulk + glaive is enough to make other fights seem secondary.

We never see Loki triggering this ability of the glaive. Is it just a default, going on at all times? That seems problematic if you needed allies around you to behave, or even take disguise and hide amidst people for any length of time. So maybe that’s not the most useful design.

What if this bad mojo was actually triggered, just passively? What if it starts quietly humming its Song of Discord when it is separated from its appointed wielder for some length of time? This would be an excellent anti-theft device, and even one that would make it hard to keep it hidden long.

How might we use this sort of strategy beyond the world-conquering semi-mystical, fictional sort? This strategy is one step beyond the authenticated-users-only constraints of smart weapons, adding a layer of deterrence from possession. Imagine if a gun pulled from its authorized user shocked the holder or occasionally sprayed malodor? Or a car that turned its volume increasingly louder after it was reported stolen? You can be sure the thieves wouldn’t keep it for long.

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.

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

Category Archives: The Avengers (2012)