The Hong Kong Mode (4 of 5)

12 Sep 2017 by Christopher Noessel

In the prior three posts, I’ve discussed the goods-and-bads of the Eye of Agamotto in the Tibet mode. (I thought I could squeeze the Hong Kong and the Dark Dimension modes into one post, but turns out this one was just too long. keep reading. You’ll see.) In this post we examine a mode that looks like the Tibet mode, but is actually quite different.

Hong Kong mode

Near the film’s climax, Strange uses the Eye to reverse Kaecilius’ destruction of the Hong Kong Sanctum Sanctorum (and much of the surrounding cityscape). In this scene, Kaecilius leaps at Strange, and Strange “freezes” Kaecilius in midair with the saucer. It’s done more quickly, but similarly to how he “freezes” the apple into a controlled-time mode in Tibet.

But then we see something different, and it complicates everything. As Strange twists the saucer counterclockwise, the cityscape around him—not just Kaecilius—begins to reverse slowly. (And unlike in Tibet, the saucer keeps spinning clockwise underneath his hand.) Then the rate of reversal accelerates, and even continues in its reversal after Strange drops his gesture and engages in a fight with Kaecilius, who somehow escapes the reversing time stream to join Strange and Mordo in the “observer” time stream.

So in this mode, the saucer is working much more like a shuttle wheel with no snap-back feature.

A shuttle wheel, as you’ll recall from the first post, doesn’t specify an absolute value along a range like a jog dial does. A shuttle wheel indicates a direction and rate of change. A little to the left is slow reverse. Far to the left is fast reverse. Nearly all of the shuttle wheels we use in the real world have snap-back features, because if you were just going to leave it reversing and pay attention to something else, you might as well use another control to get to the absolute beginning, like a jog dial. But, since Strange is scrubbing an endless “video stream,” (that is, time), and he can pull people and things out of the manipulated-stream and into the observer-stream and do stuff, not having a snap-back makes sense.

For the Tibet mode I argued for a chapter ring to provide some context and information about the range of values he’s scrubbing. So for shuttling along the past in the Hong Kong mode, I don’t think a chapter ring or content overview makes sense, but it would help to know the following.

The rate of change
Direction of change
Shifted datetime
Timedate difference from when he started

In the scene that information is kind of obvious from the environment, so I can see the argument for not having it. But if he was in some largely-unchanging environment, like a panic room or an underground cave or a Sanctum Sanctorum, knowing that information would save him from letting the shuttle go too far and finding himself in the Ordovician. A “home” button might also help to quickly recover from mistakes. Adding these signals would also help distinguish the two modes. They work differently, so they should look different. As it stands, they look identical.

He still (probably) needs future branches

Can Strange scrub the future this way? We don’t see it in the movie. But if so, we have many of the same questions as the Tibet mode future scrubber: Which timeline are we viewing & how probable is it? What other probabilities exist and how does he compare them? This argues for the addition of the future branches from that design.

Selecting the mode

So how does Strange specify the jog dial or shuttle wheel mode?

One cop-out answer is a mental command from Strange. It’s a cop-out because if the Eye responds to mental commands, this whole design exercise is moot, and we’re here to critique, practice, and learn. Not only that, but physical interfaces are more cinegenic, so better to make a concrete interaction for the film.

You might think we could modify the opening finger-tut (see the animated gif, below). But it turns out we need that for another reason: specifying the center and radius-of-effect.

Center and radius-of-effect

In Tibet, the Eye appears to affect just an apple and a tome. But since we see it affecting a whole area in Hong Kong, let’s presume the Eye affects time in a sphere. For the apple and tome, it was affecting a small sphere that included the table, too, it’s just that table didn’t change in the spans of time we see. So if it works in spheres, how is the center and the radius of the sphere set?

Center

Let’s say the Eye does some simple gaze monitoring to find the salient object at his locus of attention. Then it can center the effect on the thing and automatically set the radius of effect to the thing’s size across likely-to-be scrubbed extents. In Tibet, it’s easy. Apple? Check. Tome? Check. In Hong Kong, he’s focusing on the Sanctum, and its image recognition is smart enough to understand the concept of “this building.”

Radius

But the Hong Kong radius stretches out beyond his line of sight, affecting something with a very vague visual and even conceptual definition, that is, “the wrecked neighborhood.” So auto-setting these variables wouldn’t work without reconceiving the Eye as a general artificial intelligence. That would have some massive repercussions throughout the diegesis, so let’s avoid that.

If it’s a manual control, how does he do it? Watch the animated gif above carefully and see he’s got two steps to the “turn Eye on” tut: opening the eye by making an eye shape, and after the aperture opens, spreading his hands apart, or kind of expanding the Eye. In Tibet that spreading motion is slow and close. In Hong it’s faster and farther. That’s enough evidence to say the spread*speed determines the radius. We run into the scales problem of apple-versus-neighborhood that we had in determining the time extents, but make it logarithmic and add some visual feedback and he should be able to pick arbitrary sizes with precision.

So…back to mode selection

So if we’re committing the “turn on” gesture to specifying the center-and-radius, the only other gesture left is the saucer creation. For a quick reminder, here’s how it works in Tibet.

Since the circle works pretty well for a jog dial, let’s leave this for Tibet mode. A contrasting but related gesture would be to have Strange hold his right hand flat, in a sagittal plane, with the palm facing to his left. (See an illustration, below.) Then he can tilt his hand inside the saucer to reverse or fast forward time, and withdraw his hand from the saucer graphic to leave time moving at the adjusted rate. Let the speed of the saucer indicate speed of change. To map to a clock, tilting to the left would reverse time, and tilting to the right would advance it.

How the datetime could be shown is an exercise for the reader.

The yank out

There’s one more function we see twice in the Hong Kong scene. Strange is able to pull Mordo and Wong from the reversing time stream by thrusting the saucer toward them. This is a goofy choice of a gesture that makes no semantic sense. It would make much more sense for Strange to keep his saucer hand extended, and use his left hand to pull them from the reversing stream.

Whew.

So one of the nice things about this movie interface, is that while it doesn’t hold up under the close scrutiny of this blog, the interface to the Eye of Agamotto works while watching the film. Audience sees the apple happen, and gets that gestures + glowing green circle = adjusting time. For that, it works.

That said, we can see improvements that would not affect the script, would not require much more of the actors, and not add too much to post. It could be more consistent and believable.

But we’re not done yet. There’s one other function shown by the Eye of Agamotto when Strange takes it into the Dark Dimension, which is the final mode of the Eye, up next.

The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak

1 Aug 2017 by scoutlandish

Dr. Strange uses the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak to immobilize Kaecilius while they are fighting in the New York Sanctum.

The bands are a flexible torso shaped device, that look like a bunch of metal ribs attached to a spine. We do not actually know whether this relic has “chosen” Strange or if it simply functions for anyone who wields it correctly. But given its immense power, it definitely qualifies as a relic and opens up the conversation about whether some relics are simply masterless.

On the name

Discussing the bands is made semantically difficult for two reasons. The first is that “they” are multiple bands joined together by a single “spine” and handled in combat like a single thing. So it needn’t be plural “Bands.” That’s like calling a shoe the Running Laces of Reebok. It is an it not a they. Also it is not Crimson (even in the comic books, most folks would call them pink.) They are not actually named in the film, but authoritative source material indicates that is what these are. So forgive the weirdness, but this post will discuss the bands as a single thing. An it.

So where did it get its plural name? Comic book fans have already noted: In the books, the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak are actually a spell for binding. They are—no surprise—glowing crimson bands of energy, and used by many spellcasters, not just Strange. Here they are in The Uncanny X-Men, cast by the Scarlet Witch and subsequently smashed by Magik.

Since these are in fact, multiples, its plural there makes sense. Its reimagining as a single thing for the Marvel Cinematic Universe is what has us speaking of it in the singular.

Operation

The operation of the device seems to be very simple. Upon impact with a person, the bands quickly twist and clamp to immobilize the limbs, arms, head, and torso of the person. It also covers their mouth so no spells can be cast (or instructions given to minions).

How might this work as technology?

The Crimson Bands are robotic device composed of a self-powered collection of electromagnetic metal hinges and locks, with bands that are interwoven with muscle wire to adjust to a person’s body.

En route to a collision with a humanoid body, the microcomputer scans the surface area of the person using LIDAR to create a surface mapping and body model. This allows the Bands to adjust itself midair to achieve the proper orientation. Then the primary mechanical controller snaps each band shut in sequence beginning with the torso and expanding to the extremities. As each section finds purchase, it tightens, adjusting and locking in place. The sequence takes only a few seconds and leaves the victim in a rigid kneeling position where they are immobilized to prevent any kind of action or spellcasting. The bands that cover the mouth can be removed independently to allow interrogation.

What works well

It’s non-lethal, but still neutralizes a very powerful enemy.
It does not require a great deal of precision. Toss it roughly toward the enemy, and it will do its best to compensate for your imprecision. “Close enough” counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, earthquakes, and the Crimson Bands.
It probably works on a variety of humanoid body shapes and sizes.
The ability to remove the mouth band is useful for interrogation.

Improvements: Provide a keyhole

We never see an obvious release mechanism, but there is one, as Strange discovers when Kaecilius has been freed when Strange returns to the Sanctum. We can’t exactly critique what we don’t see, but we can discuss the affordance of the function. Should it be obvious? Probably but not too obvious, less a zealot run up and quickly figure out how to free their boss. But there should be some sort of “keyhole” that will help Strange know that he needs some sort of “key” to release his prisoner and not leave him in a stress position indefinitely. So there should be the equivalent of a keyhole on the bands. And hopefully one the Cloak can explain, or Strange can figure out.

Improvements: Miniaturize

While highly effective, this artifact is not particularly useful unless you happen to be in a fight while standing next to it. It’s simply too large and bulky to carry around. So, if it could be miniaturized, it would prove more generally useful. Or maybe, since this occurs in a world with magical flight and teleportation, they could be summonable.

Improvements: Authorization

It seems that the Cloak isn’t authorized to use this artifact. (Why else waste all that time trying to pull Strange to it?) Authorizing the Cloak would mean additional agentive controls for dealing with, you know, groups of zealots. We also don’t know if it has a “whitelist” of people it should not immobilize, but that would be useful to prevent it being turned against its owner.

Improvements: Nonhumanoid

The overall shape of the bands are humanoid, indicating that they would not likely function on anything other than a being with the standard humanoid legs, arms, head, mouth, and torso. This fortunately covers most of the characters in the Marvel Universe, but there are a handful of exceptions. If it had a more micro-component based design, it might be able to reconfigure itself to help with non-humanoid malefactors as well.

Then we’d have to come up with some other mechanism to account for scaling to Rhunian, Celestial, or Faltine-sized things.

Vaulting Boots of Valtor

25 Jul 2017 by scoutlandish

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

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

How might this work as tech?

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

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

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

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

The glowing bits

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

Activation?

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

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

More!

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

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

Staff of the Living Tribunal

20 Jun 2017 by Christopher Noessel and scoutlandish

This staff appears to be made of wood and is approximately a meter long when in its normal form. When activated by Mordo it has several powers. With a strong pull on both ends, the staff expands into a jointed energy nunchaku. It can also extend to an even greater length like a bullwhip. When it impacts a solid object such as a floor, it seems to release a crack of loud energy. Too bad we only ever see it in demo mode.

How might this work as technology?

The staff is composed of concentric rings within rings of material similar to a collapsing travel cup. This allows the device to expand and contract in length. The handle would likely contain the artificial intelligence and a power source that activates when Mordo gives it a gestural command, or if we’re thinking far future, a mental one. There might also be an additional control for energy discharge.

In the movie, sadly, Mordo does not use the Staff to its best effect, especially when Kaecilius returns to the New York sanctum. Mordo could easily disrupt the spell being cast by the disciples using the staff like a whip, but instead he leaps off the balcony to physically attack them. Dude, you’re the franchise’s next Big Bad? But let’s put down the character’s missteps to look at the interface.

Mode switching and inline meta-signals

Any time you design a thing with modes, you have to design the state changes between those modes. Let’s look at how Mordo moves between staff, nunchaku, and whip in this short demonstration scene.

To go from staff to nunchaku, Mordo pulls it apart. It’s now in a dangerous state, so is there any authentication or safety switch here? It could be there, but all passive via contact sensors, which would be the best so it could be activated in a hurry. The film doesn’t give us any clue, really, so that’s an open question.

How does it know to go from nunchaku to whip? It sure would be crappy to bet on a disabling thwack against your opponent only to find it lazily draping over a shoulder instead. (Pere Perez might have advanced ideas, given his ideas on light saber tactics.) Again, this state change could be passive, detecting in real time the subtle gestural differences in a distal snap, which a bullwhip would need, and lateral force, which sets the nunchaku spinning, and adjust between the two accordingly. Gestural and predictive technologies are not particularly cinegenic, so let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and say that’s what’s happening.

A last mode is After Mordo cracks it against the ground, it retracts back to Staff form. This is the hardest one to buy. Certainly it’s a most dramatic ending for Mordo’s demonstration. But does it snap back automatically after it strikes a surface? Automation is not always the answer. Deliberate control would mean Mordo doesn’t have to waste time undoing unwanted automatic actions.

Critical systems must be extremely confident in their interpretations before automation is the right choice.

It might be that this particular gesture is a retraction signal, but how the Staff distinguishes this from a mid-combat strike is tricky. It would have to have sophisticated situational awareness to know the difference, and it doesn’t display this. Better backworlding would point at some subtle gestural signal from Mordo. A double-tightening of his grip, maybe. Or even a double-slight-release of his grip, since that’s something he’s quite unlikely to do in combat.

This is a broad pattern for designers to remember. Inline control signals should be simple-to-provide, but unlikely to occur in literal use. Imagine if the Winter Soldier’s Trigger Phrase wasn’t “Longing, rusted, 17, daybreak, furnace, 9, benign, homecoming, 1, freight car” but instead was the word “the.” He’d be berserking every few seconds. Unworkable. So, if you were designing the Staff’s retraction command gesture, you’d have to pick something he could remember and perform easily, and that would be difficult to accidentally provide.

If Mordo has the staff in the next film, I hope the control modes are clearer and of course well-designed.

Cyberspace: Newark Copyshop

20 Mar 2017 by scifihughf

The transition from Beijing to the Newark copyshop is more involved. After he travels around a bit, he realizes he needs to be looking back in Newark. He “rewinds” using a pull gesture and sees the copyshop’s pyramid. First there is a predominantly blue window that unfolds as if it were paper.

And then the copyshop initial window expands. Like the Beijing hotel, this is a floor plan view, but unlike the hotel it stays two dimensional. It appears that cyberspace works like the current world wide web, with individual servers for each location that can choose what appearance to present to visitors.

Johnny again selects data records, but not with a voice command. The first transition is a window that not only expands but spins as it does so, and makes a strange jump at the end from the centre to the upper left.

Once again Johnny uses the two-handed expansion gesture to see the table view of the records.

Johnny searches again, but either because there are so few records or because they’re in English, he doesn’t use voice commands. Instead he just runs his fingers over the cells, which highlight as he does so. Again this would be familiar to a current day spreadsheet user.

The contents of the cell are, once more, not useful. Johnny dismisses the copyshop with a sweeping arm gesture which slides the “window” off the right of the screen.

Aside: At normal viewing speed, it looks like the window disappears and, as would be the case in a 1995 or current day desktop system, reveals the previously-displayed windows underneath. Stepping through frame by frame shows that actually it reveals an identical copy of the sliding content! Graphics programmers have always tried hard to avoid such visual glitches, but sometimes they slip into production code anyway.

At this point in the plot, Johnny hasn’t found the images he so desperately needs. He thinks for a moment, and decides to contact the owner of a local bulletin board. Unknown to him, he has also been located by the Pharmakom tracker. Shinji and the Yakuza are on the way, and Shinji orders “initiate the virus.”

Talking to a Puppet

16 Feb 2017 by scifihughf

As mentioned, Johnny in the last phone conversation in the van is not talking to the person he thinks he is. The film reveals Takahashi at his desk, using his hand as if he were a sock puppeteer—but there is no puppet. His desk is emitting a grid of green light to track the movement of his hand and arm.

The Make It So chapter on gestural interfaces suggests Takahashi is using his hand to control the mouth movements of the avatar. I’d clarify this a bit. Lip synching by human animators is difficult even when not done in real time, and while it might be possible to control the upper lip with four fingers, one thumb is not enough to provide realistic motion of the lower lip.

Instead I suggest that the same computer modifying his voice is also providing the fine mouth movements, using the same camera that must be present for the video phone calls. So what are the hand motions for? They provide cues as to how fast or slow Takahashi wants his puppet to speak, further disguising his own speech patterns. And the arm position could provide different body language for the avatar as a whole, to ensure for example that the puppet avatar does not react with surprise or anger even if Takahashi himself expresses those emotions.

We saw this avatar in a phone call once before, when Johnny dialed into an internal phone number from the phone booth. But we’ve also seen the video image of Takahashi himself when he called Street Preacher. Perhaps the avatar is an option for incoming calls, just as today we can assign custom ringtones to individual callers on our mobiles. For outgoing calls, an important person such as Takahashi would be more likely to use his true face to impress the callee.

Video phones have been predicted in science fiction fiction and film for a very long time now, but have never achieved wide scale usage. Human communication is richer and more expressive when we can see each other, so why are we resistant? One reason is that in the real world we don’t have makeup artists following us around to ensure we look our best at all times. Donald Norman suggested in chapter 8 of his book Things That Make Us Smart that real time video enhancement would solve this problem, but then if we’re all going to be presenting false avatars to each other, why bother?

A Cringing Computer

After the call ends, Anna, a personality uploaded into a mainframe, appears on the screen. Takahashi is annoyed by this and makes a sweeping arm gesture to get rid of her, detected by the green light grid. The computer screen actually sinks into the desk in response.

This is discussed in chapter 10 of the book as an interface handling emotional input. I’d like to add that this is also an emotional output, the computer seeming to hide itself from an angry user. Given how often current day users express the wish to beat their computers with heavy blunt objects, perhaps that is exactly what it is doing.

Computers in film and TV often have annoying personalities, which is surprising for (presumably) commercial products. Another cringing computer, emphasised by being named “Slave”, made regular appearances in season 4 of Blake’s 7. Would users feel more comfortable if their computer systems gave the appearance of being afraid every time they had to report an error? It’s worth considering.

Jefferson Projection

18 Jan 2016 by Christopher Noessel

When Imperial troopers intrude to search the house, one of the bullying officers takes interest in a device sitting on the dining table. It’s the size of a sewing machine, with a long handle along the top. It has a set of thumb toggles along the top, like old cassette tape recorder buttons.

Saun convinces the officer to sit down, stretches the thin script with a bunch of pointless fiddling of a volume slider and pantomimed delays, and at last fumbles the front of the device open. Hinged at the bottom like a drawbridge, it exposes a small black velvet display space. Understandably exasperated, the officer stands up to shout, “Will you get on with it?” Saun presses a button on the opened panel, and the searing chord of an electric guitar can be heard at once.

Inside the drawbridge-space a spot of pink light begins to glow, and mesmerized officer who, moments ago was bent on brute intimidation, but now spends the next five minutes and 23 seconds grinning dopily at the volumetric performance by Jefferson Starship.

During the performance, 6 lights link in a pattern in the upper right hand corner of the display. When the song finishes, the device goes silent. No other interactions are seen with it.

Many questions. Why is there a whole set of buttons to open the thing? Is this the only thing it can play? If not, how do you select another performance?Is it those unused buttons on the top? Why are the buttons unlabeled? Is Jefferson Starship immortal? How is it that they have only aged in the long, long time since this was recorded? Or was this volumetric recording somehow sent back in time? Where is the button that Saun pressed to start the playback? If there was no button, and it was the entire front panel, why doesn’t it turn on and off while the officer taps (see above)? What do the little lights do other than distract? Why is the glow pink rather than Star-Wars-standard blue? Since volumetric projections are most often free-floating, why does this appear in a lunchbox? Since there already exists ubiquitous display screens, why would anyone haul this thing around? How does this officer keep his job?

Perhaps it’s best that these questions remain unanswered. For if anything were substantially different, we would risk losing this image, of the silhouette of the lead singer and his microphone. Humanity would be the poorer for it.

Avengers, assembly!

24 Nov 2015 by Christopher Noessel

When Coulson hands Tony a case file, it turns out to be an exciting kind of file. For carrying, it’s a large black slab. After Tony grabs it, he grabs the long edges and pulls in opposite directions. One part is a thin translucent screen that fits into an angled slot in the other part, in a laptop-like configuration, right down to a built-in keyboard.

The grip edge

The grip edge of the screen is thicker than the display, so it has a clear, physical affordance as to what part is meant to be gripped and how to pull it free from its casing, and simultaneously what end goes into the base. It’s simple and obvious. The ribbing on the grip unfortunately runs parallel to the direction of pull. It would make for a better grip and a better affordance if the grip was perpendicular to the direction of pull. Minor quibble.

I’d be worried about the ergonomics of an unadjustable display. I’d be worried about the display being easily unseated or dislodged. I’d also be worried about the strength of the join. Since there’s no give, enough force on the display might snap it clean off. But then again this is a world where “vibrium steel” exists, so material critiques may not be diegetically meaningful.

Login

Once he pulls the display from the base, the screen boops and animated amber arcs spin around the screen, signalling him to login via a rectangular panel on the right hand side of the screen. Tony puts his four fingers in the spot and drags down. A small white graphic confirms his biometrics. As a result, a WIMP display appears in grays and amber colors.

Briefing materials

One window on the left hand side shows a keypad, and he enters 1-8-5-4. The keypad disappears and a series of thumbnail images—portraits of members of the Avengers initiative—appear in its place. Pepper asks Tony, “What is all this?” Tony replies, saying, “This is, uh…” and in a quick gesture, places his ten fingertips on the screen at the portraits, and then throws his hands outward, off the display.

The portraits slide offscreen to become ceiling-height volumetric windows filled with rich media dossiers on Thor, Steve Rogers, and David Banner. There are videos, portraits, schematics, tables of data, cellular graphics, and maps. There’s a smaller display near the desktop where the “file” rests about the tesseract. (More on this bit in the next post.)

Insert standard complaint here about the eye strain that a translucent display causes, and the apology that yes, I understand it’s an effective and seemingly high-tech way to show actors and screens simultaneously. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

The two-part login shows an understanding of multifactor authentication—a first in the survey, so props for that. Tony must provide something he “is”, i.e. his fingerprints, and something he knows, i.e. the passcode. Only then does the top secret information become available.

I have another standard grouse about the screen providing no affordances that content has an alternate view available, and that a secret gesture summons that view. I’d also ordinarily critique the displays for having nearly no visual hierarchy, i.e. no way for your eyes to begin making sense of it, and a lot of pointless-motion noise that pulls your attention in every which way.

But, this beat is about the wonder of the technology, the breadth of information SHIELD in its arsenal, and the surprise of familiar tech becoming epic, so I’m giving it a narrative pass.

Also, OK, Tony’s a universe-class hacker, so maybe he’s just knowledgeable/cocky enough to not need the affordances and turned them off. All that said, in my due diligence: Affordances still matter, people.

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.

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.

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

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