Headsets

20 Dec 2016 by Christopher Noessel

Luke, Chewie, the comms officer aboard the Revenge, and this orange lizard/cat thing wear similar headsets in the short. Each consists of headphones with a coronal headband and a microphone on a boom that holds it in front of their mouths.

An animated character with short blonde hair and headphones, seated in a spaceship cockpit with a view of space in the background.

Screenshot of a monitor displaying a red creature and a robotic figure in a futuristic environment with computer interface elements.

The only time we see something resembling a control, Luke attempts to report back to the Rebel base. To do so, he uses his right hand to pinch (or hold?) the microphone as he says, “This is Y4 to base.” Then he releases the mic and continues, “He’s heading straight for a moon in…the Panna system.”

Questionable sound isolation

Part of the point of the headsets is to isolate sounds coming through the radio from the ambient noise. But Luke can hear and chat with C-3PO speaking at regular, conversational volumes, so it’s not isolating that much sound. Maybe it’s super-sophisticated noise-cancellation but that’s a lot of credit to give considering the evidence.

Additionally, when Chewie shoots across the bow at the Y-Wing, we hear the artificially-generated weapon-warning noises throughout the cockpit, so it’s a detriment to hide that noise from him. Better would be to have the audio incorporated into the cockpit, which lets him listen for the sounds of the Y-wing around him as well.

Unclear Activation

It’s not exactly clear that Luke’s touching the mic is an affectation or an actual control. If it was push-to-talk the Revenge wouldn’t have heard anything when he lifted his hands after the callsigns and spoke the actual message. Hopefully it’s not.

The Y-Wing is a combat ship, so it’s questionable to require the pilot to dedicate a hand that could be needed for complex maneuvers for the duration of speech. In fact, it seems to undo much of the benefit of wearing a headset instead of using a handset or something like a handheld CB radio microphone (like Wash’s comm system in Firefly).

A wise design would assign one of those many stay-state toggle switches on the console to keep the channel open and operate by voice activation in maneuver-heavy situations. For more casual conversation, he could switch it back to push-to-talk mode, to avoid accidental noise or interruptions on the channel.

It should be said that a wise pilot needing to communicate with his hands on the yoke might offload this task to the human-cyborg relations droid sitting right there behind him, but you know who am I to question an animated Jedi?

Semantic Controls

Having the control located at the mic is an intuitive design choice, because it means users can chunk these two things as a single thing in memory: The place for talking. It might seem a little odd because when you speak without a mic you would cover your mouth to muffle speech, but since with the headset you’re speaking with the person “in” the mic, the semantics make sense. The behavior also serves a nice social signal to others in the room to indicate that the speaker is communicating to someone not present (similar to the headset ear-touches in The Fifth Element.)

This pinch-to-talk control also appears in *A New Hope*, briefly, during the attack on the Death Star, so has precedent.

Questionable mic placement

Having the mic directly in front of the mouth is a poor placement. As sci-fi fans know, speech is air squirted through meat, and putting a mic in the path of that air means the plosive sounds (t, k, p, d, g, and b) can peak out. For audio purists, the proximity effect also means that the proximity of a directional mic to the mouth will over-accentuate and peak the bass responses. But, maybe the Rebels have access to omnidirectional mics that avoid the proximity effect. Still, a better placement to avoid the popping plosives would be just off of the rushing column of squirted air, say near the cheek or chin.

Security

When Luke says “Y4 to base,” it indicates that the system is a radiotelephony model, like the ham radio system. People agree to use radio to speak and listen on pre-arranged channels or sequence of channels, and anyone who knows the channel can lurk and steal important information, like, say, the location of the most wanted Rebel outlaws in the galaxy.

Modern, encrypted, one-to-one communications systems make this seem horribly not-secure, but such systems proved reasonable throughout the World Wars of the prior century. But, even back then there were lots of ways to hedge your bets towards privacy, (like using code or Selective Calling to name just a few) so its absence here is striking, especially since we’ll see in the next review how easy it is to intercept even video messages in the world of The Faithful Wookiee.

That said, extradiegetically, we can cut some slack since they probably aren’t speaking English, either, and both the common and coded Aurebesh have been translated for us.

Ship Console

20 Dec 2016 by Christopher Noessel

The only flight controls we see are an array of stay-state toggle switches (see the lower right hand of the image above) and banks of lights. It’s a terrifying thought that anyone would have to fly a spaceship with binary controls, but we have some evidence that there’s analog controls, when Luke moves his arms after the Falcon fires shots across his bow.

Unfortunately we never get a clear view of the full breadth of the cockpit, so it’s really hard to do a proper analysis. Ships in the Holiday Special appear to be based on scenes from A New Hope, but we don’t see the inside of a Y-Wing in that movie. It seems to be inspired by the Falcon. Take a look at the upper right hand corner of the image below.

R. S. Revenge Comms

13 Dec 2016 by Christopher Noessel

Note: In honor of the season, Rogue One opening this week, and the reviews of Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series behind us, I’m reopening the Star Wars Holiday Special reviews, starting with the show-within-a-show, The Faithful Wookie. Refresh yourself of the plot if it’s been a while.

On board the R.S. Revenge, the purple-skinned communications officer announces he’s picked up something. (Genders are a goofy thing to ascribe to alien physiology, but the voice actor speaks in a masculine register, so I’m going with it.)

He attends a monitor, below which are several dials and controls in a panel. On the right of the monitor screen there are five physical controls.

A stay-state toggle switch
A stay-state rocker switch
Three dials

The lower two dials have rings under them on the panel that accentuate their color.

Map View

The screen is a dark purple overhead map of the impossibly dense asteroid field in which the Revenge sits. A light purple grid divides the space into 48 squares. This screen has text all over it, but written in a constructed orthography unmentioned in the Wookieepedia. In the upper center and upper right are unchanging labels. Some triangular label sits in the lower-left. In the lower right corner, text appears and disappears too fast for (human) reading. The middle right side of the screen is labeled in large characters, but they also change too rapidly to make much sense of it.

Luke, looking over the shoulder of the comms officer at the same monitor, exclaims, “It’s the Millennium Falcon!”

faithful-wookiee-12 — Seriously, Luke, how can you tell this?

Watching the glowing dot and crosshairs blink and change position several times, the comms officer says, “They’re coming out of light speed. I can’t make contact.” An off-screen voice tells him to “Try a lower channel.” Something causes the channel to change (the comms officer’s hands do not touch anything that we can see), and then the monitor shows a video feed from the Falcon.

Video Feed

The video feed has an overlay to the upper left hand side, consisting of lines of text which appear from top to bottom in a palimpsest formation, even though the copy is left-aligned. At the top is a label with changing characters, looking something like a time stamp.

Analysis of the Map View

Since we can’t read the video overlay in the video feed, and it doesn’t interfere with the image, there’s not much to say about it. Instead I’ll focus on the map view.

Hand-drawn Inconsistency

In the side angle shot, which we see first, we see the dial colors go from top to bottom, as beige, red, yellow. In the facing shot of this interface, which immediately follows the side shot, the dials go beige, yellow, red. The red and yellow are transposed. Itʼs of course possible that the dials have a variable hue, and changed at exactly the same time the camera switches. But then we have to explain where his hand went, and why we don’t see any of the other elements changing color, and so on…

A purple character with a space suit interacts with a technological device, while a group of characters, including one dressed in yellow and one in a white gown, observe the scene in a futuristic setting.

A futuristic monitor displaying a purple grid with various cosmic elements and symbols, featuring graphical data and navigation controls on the right side.

This illustrates one of the problems with reviewing hand-drawn animation (and why scifiinterfaces generally frowns upon it.) It takes a hand-drawing animator extra work to keep things consistent from screen to screen. She must have a reference when drawing the interface from any new angle, and this extra work is on top of all the other things she has to manage like color and timing. Fewer people will notice transposed dial colors than, say, the comms officer turning orange instead of purple, so the interface is low on that priority stack.

Contrast that with live-action and computer-animated interfaces. In these modes of working, it takes extra work to change interfaces from shot to shot, so you run into consistency problems much less frequently.

I’ve written about this before in the abstract, but it’s nice to have a simple and easily shown example in the blog to point to.

2Dness

Another problem with the interface is that it is 2-D, but space is 3-D.

When picking a projection to display, we have to keep in mind that it is more immediate to understand an impending collision when presented as 2-D information: Constant bearing, decreasing range = Trouble. So, perhaps the view has automatically aligned itself to be perpendicular to the Falcon’s approach, which makes it easier to monitor the decreasing distance.

If so, he would need to see that automatically-aligned status reflected somewhere in the interface, and have access to controls that let him change the view and snap back to this Most Useful View. Admittedly, this is a lot of apologetics to apply, when really, it’s most likely the old trope 2-D Space.

Attention and memory

There are some nicely designed attention cues. The crosshairs, glowing dot, and motion graphics makes it so that—even though we can’t read the language—we can tell what’s of interest on the screen. One dot moving towards another, stationary dot. We’re set up for the Falcon’s buzzing the base.

That’s probably the best thing that can be said for it.

The text is terrible, changing too fast for a human reader. (Yes, yes, put down that emerging comment. Purple-face isnʼt human, but we must evaluate interfaces considering what is useful to us, and right now that means us humans.) The text changes so much faster than the blinking, in fact, that it’s pulling attention away from it. Narratively, the rapid-fire text helps convey a sense of urgency, but it greatly costs readability. It’s not a good model for real world design.

The blinking crosshair might most accurately reflect the actual position of the detected object within the radar sweep. But it could help the officer more. As with medical signals, data points are not as interesting as information trends. As it is, it relies on his memory to piece together the information, which means he has to constantly monitor the screen to make sense. If instead the view featured an evaporating trail of data points, not only could he look away without missing too much information, but he would also notice that the speed and direction are slightly erratic, which would prove quite interesting to anyone trying to ascertain the status of the ship. One glance shows things are not as they should be. The Falcon is clearly careening.

tracking_assistance — Actual points from the animation.

Mysterious Control

When we first see the comms officer, he has his unmoving hand on one of the dials. But when we see the map switch to the video feed, none of the controls we can see are touched. This raises a possibility and a question.

The possibility is that there is control by some other mechanism. My best guess is that it is voice control, since the Rebel General says “try a lower channel” just before it switches. Maybe he was not speaking to the comms officer, but to the machine itself. And given C3PO, they clearly have the technology to recognize and act on natural language, though it’s usually associated with a full general artificial intelligence. A Rebel Siri (33 years before it came out in Apple’s iOS) makes sense from an apologetics sense.

If so, there are some aspects of the UI missing to signal to an operator that the machine is listening, and hearing, and understanding what is being said, as well as whether the speaker is authorized to control. After all, the comms officer is wearing the headset, but it was the red-bearded general who issued the command. I imagine it’s not OK for anyone on the bridge to just shout out controls.

faithful-wookiee-13 — Just General Burnside, here.

The question then, is if the channel is controlled by voice, what are the physical controls for? They’re lacking labels of any kind. Perhaps they’re there as a backup, should voice control fail. Perhaps they are vestigial, left over from before voice control was installed. Maybe only the general has a voice override and the comms officer must use the physical controls. Any of these would be fine backworlding explanations, but my favorite idea is that the dials are for controlling nuanced variables in very fluid ways with instant feedback.

It’s easier to twiddle a dial to change the frequency of a radio to find a low-power signal than to keep saying “back…forward…no, back just a bit.” That would help explain what the comms officer was doing with his hands on the dials when he got something but not when the general voice-controls the channel.

In general

The interface shows some sophistication in styling and visual hierarchy, and if we give it lots of benefit of the doubt, might even be handling some presentation variables for the user in sophisticated ways. But the distractions of the rapid-fire text, the lack of trend lines, the lack of labels for the physical controls, and the missing affordances for projection control and voice control feedback make it a poor model for any real world design.

The Fermi Paradox and Sci-fi

31 May 2016 by Christopher Noessel

In the prior post we introduced the Fermi paradox—or Fermi question—before an overview of the many hypotheses that try to answer the question, and ended noting that we must consider what we are to do, given the possibilities. In this post I’m going to share which of those hypotheses that screen-based sci-fi has chosen to tell stories about.

First we should note that screen sci-fi (this is, recall, a blog that concerns itself with sci-fi in movies and television), since the very, very beginning, has embraced questionably imperialist thrills. In Le Voyage dans la Lune, George Melies’ professor-astronomers encounter a “primitive” alien culture on Earth’s moon when they land there, replete with costumes, dances, and violent responses to accidental manslaughter. Hey, we get it, aliens are part of why audiences and writers are in it: As a thin metaphor for speculative human cultures that bring our own into relief. So, many properties are unconcerned with the *yawn* boring question of the Fermi paradox, instead imagining a diegesis with a whole smörgåsbord of alien civilizations that are explicitly engaged with humans, at times killing, trading, or kissing us, depending on which story you ask.

But some screen sci-fi does occasionally concern itself with the Fermi question.

Which are we telling stories about?

Screen sci-fi is a vast library, and more is being produced all the time, so it’s hard to give an exact breakdown, but if Drake can do it for Fermi’s question, we can at least ballpark it, too. To do this, I took a look at every sci-fi in the survey that produced Make It So and has been extended here on scifiinterfaces.com, and I tallied the breakdown between aliens, no aliens, and silent aliens. Here’s the Google Sheet with the data. And here’s what we see.

No aliens is the clear majority of stories! This is kind of surprising for me, since when I think of sci-fi my brain pops bug eyes and tentacles alongside blasters and spaceships. But it also makes sense because a lot of sci-fi is near future or focused on the human condition.

Some notes about these numbers.

I counted all the episodes or movies that exist in a single diegesis as one. So the two single largest properties in the sci-fi universe, Star Trek and Star Wars, only count once each. That seems unfair, since we’ve spent lots more total minutes of our lives with C3PO and the Enterprise crews than we have with Barbarella. This results in low-seeming numbers. There’s only 53 diegeses at the time of this writing even though it spans thousands of hours of shows. But all that said, this is ballpark problem, meant to tally rationales across diegeses, so we’ll deal with numbers that skew differently than our instincts would suggest. Someone else with a bigger budget of time or money can try and get exhaustive with the number, attempt to normalize for total minutes of media produced, and again for number of alien species referenced at their leisure, and then again for how popular the particular show was. Those numbers may be different.

Additionally the categorizations can be ambiguous. Should Star Trek go in “Silent Aliens” because of the Prime Directive, or under “Aliens” since the show has lots and lots and lots of aliens? Since the Fermi question seeks to answer why Silent Aliens are silent in our real world now, I opted for Silent Aliens, but that’s an arguable choice. Should The Martian count as “Life is Rare” since it’s competence porn that underscores how fragile life is? Should Deep Impact show that life is rare even though they never talk about aliens? It’s questionable to categorize something on a strong implication, but I did it where I felt the connection was strong. Additionally I may have ranked something as “no reason” because I missed an explanatory line of dialog somewhere. Please let me know if I missed something major or got something wrong in the comments.

All that said, let’s look back and see how those broad numbers break down when we look at individual Fermi hypotheses. First, we should omit shows with aliens. They categorically exclude themselves. Aliens is an obvious example. Also, let’s exclude shows that are utterly unconcerened with the question of aliens, e.g. Logan’s Run, (or those that never bother to provide an explanation as to why aliens may have been silent for so long, e.g. The Fifth Element.) We also have to dismiss the other show in the survey that shows a long-dead species but does not investigate why, Total Recall (1990). Aaaaand holy cow, that takes us down to only 8 shows that give some explanation for the historical absence or silence of aliens. Since that number is so low, I’ll list the shows explicitly to the right of their numbers. I’ll leave the numbers as percentages for consistency when I get to increase the data set.

No Aliens

8% Life is rare: Battlestar Galactica (2004)
25% Life doesn’t last (Natural disasters): Deep Impact, The Core, Armaggedon
8% Life doesn’t last (Technology will destroy us): Forbidden Planet

Silent Aliens

8% Superpredators: Oblivion
0% Information is dangerous
33% Prime directive: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mission to Mars, Star Trek
0% Isolationism
0% Zoo
0% Planetarium
0% Lighthouse hello
0% Still ringing
8% Hicksville: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
0% Too distributed
0% Tech mismatch
0% Inconceivability
0% Too expensive
8% Cloaked: Men in Black

(*2% lost to rounding)

It’s at this point that some readers are sharpening their keyboards to inform me of the shows I’ve missed, and that’s great. I would rather have had the data before, but I’m just a guy and nothing motivates geeks like an incorrect pop culture data set. We can run these numbers again when more come in and see what changes.

In the meantime, the first thing we note is that of those that concern themselves with the question of Silent Aliens, most use some version of the prime directive.

Respectively, they say we have to do A Thing before they’ll contact us.

Mature ethically
Mature technologically by finding the big obelisk on the moon (and then the matching one around Jupiter)
Mature technologically by mastering faster-than-light travel
Find the explanatory kiosk/transportation station on Mars

It’s easy to understand why Prime Directives would be attractive as narrative rationales. It explains why things are so silent now, and puts the onus on us as a species to achieve The Thing, to do good, to improve. They are inspirational and encourage us to commit to space travel.

The second thing to note, is that those that concern themselves with the notion that Life Doesn’t Last err toward disaster porn, which is attractive because such films are tried and true formulas. The dog gets saved along with the planet, that one person died, there’s a ticker tape parade after they land, and the love interests reconcile. Some are ridiculous. Some are competent. None stand out to me as particularly memorable or life changing. I can’t think of one that illustrates how it is inevitable.

So prime directives and disaster porn are the main answers we see in sci-fi. Are those the right ones? I’ll discuss that in the next post. Stay Tuned.

The Faithful Wookiee

2 Feb 2016 by Christopher Noessel

Faithful-Wookiee-10

Release Date: 17 NOV 1978 (USA)

Despite what you may think, I know how far down the Sarlacc pit this is going. I’m in the middle of The Avengers, which I interrupted for the Star Wars Holiday Special, and now we’re looking at the interfaces inside a ten-minute cartoon that Lumpy watches complacently while stormtroopers trash his home and rough up his family in the background. We’re at Inception level Hoth.

I even know I have proclaimed that I must shy away from reviewing interfaces in hand-drawn animation on principle. I know all this. But if you have yet to brave gazing into the dark heart of The Special, know that this is its highlight. The animation is gorgeous and trippy (like something out of Heavy Metal magazine circa 1980) almost making the frame story of The Special worth it. Even if the plot is a little wan.

Plot

Luke, the droids, and Leia are aboard the cruiser R.S. Revenge, anxiously awaiting word from Han and Chewie, who are racing to find a mystical talisman before the Empire does. The Millennium Falcon comes out of lightspeed barreling toward the cruiser and out of radio contact. After it zooms past, Luke takes the droids and chases the Falcon to an intensely pink moon. Luke crashes into the soupy surface, and while looking for them with binoculars, he is saved from a pink sauropod attack by Boba Fett. (Yes, that Boba Fett. This is where he is introduced in the Star Wars universe.) Fett then leads them to the Falcon.

There Luke sees Chewie eject the talisman from the ship, before falling into the same coma-like sleep as Han. Turns out the talisman is infected with a virus that only affects humans. To survive, Luke is hung upside down next to Han until they can be cured. Something something blood to the brain something. Fett offers to get a remedy in the nearby city.

After he gets the serum, Fett contacts Darth Vader (insert gasp) on a public video phone (insert gasp). Back at the ship, the Droids intercept the message, hearing that the talisman is a red herring—Fett and Vader are really trying to earn their trust to learn the location of the new Rebel base. When Fett returns to the Falcon, they inject the serum to wake Han and Luke, but the droids out Fett as the bad guy he is. Fett escapes with his jet pack, promising that they’ll meet again.

Faithful-Wookiee-09

Lumpy’s Brilliant Cartoon Player

26 Jan 2016 by Christopher Noessel

I am pleased to report that with this post, we are over 50% of the way through this wretched, wretched Holiday Special.

Description

After Lumpy tries to stop stormtroopers from going upstairs, an Imperial Officer commands Malla to keep him quiet. To do so, she does what any self-respecting mother of a pre-teen in the age of technology does, and sits him down to watch cartoons. The player is a small, yellow device that sits flat on an angled tabletop, like a writing desk.

Two small silver buttons stack vertically on the left, and an upside down plug hole strainer on the right. A video screen sits above these controls. Since no one in the rest of his family wants to hear the cartoon introduction of Boba Fett, he dons a pair of headphones, which are actually kind of stylish in that the earpieces are square and perforated, but not beveled. There are some pointless animations that start up, but then the cartoon starts and Lumpy is, in fact, quiet for the duration. So, OK, point one Malla.

SWHS-Cartoon-Player-08 — Why no budding DJ has glommed onto this for an album cover is beyond me.

Analysis

We only see Lumpy press down onto the surface of the device from the far side, so it’s mostly conjecture about how the interface works. The same goes for the media. But we do know the basic needs of video: Start, stop, and volume. And a single click-stop dial could handle all that, even if kind of poorly.

We also don’t know whether the device has media inserts—like a Blu-Ray player—or is more like a television with fixed streams of ongoing content to pick from, or like a Netflix requiring a search of a practically infinite on-demand catalogue. But that sink drain thing looks like it’s meant to be a channel selector, and this was 1978, so let’s presume it was a television model with a few-year prescient Walkman personal-media bent. In fact, there’s a handle visible in the shot posted below, so let’s give this thing some credit for presaging miniaturization to the point of mobility. It must have blown some kids minds back then.

And, sure, this interface could manage the task at hand, even if it’s missing some feedback for exactly which channel is being watched, and what the current volume is or what that second click-stop dial does, or why it has an affordance for turning when Lumpy clearly pushes it.

Apology

What I’m most interested in though is the crappy, crappy production quality of the thing. While it’s easy and admittedly fun to decry this as rushed through the prop department in about 30 minutes, I’m going to use my old friend apologetics to wonder if maybe Lumpy himself put this together. Not like a science fair project, but as an off-the shelf product. Wouldn’t it be awesome to give a kid a blank box with a video screen, let him take any object he found on top of it to use as a control device? A thimble could become the on-off switch. A jack could become the channel selector. A Matchbox car could become the volume control. This would diegetically explain the dopey sink strainer, and give Lumpy an awesome opportunity to think about the affordances of the things around him and the relationships-of-parts he could use to control abstract variables like volume, power, playback speed, etc. Maybe he could even assign objects to favorite videos. This stone in that crayon circle means that video. It would be a dream to foster interaction design thinking.

Sure, you might be thinking, but this would take cameras of an eye-like quality, and perfect image recognition attached to a near general artificial intelligence. Too bad they don’t have anything like that in Star Wars, yeah?

Of course one imagines such a device might be prohibitively expensive for a smuggler’s Life Day budget, and moreover this is giving the Star Wars Holiday Special waaaaay too much credit, but these are the truffles I actually do hope to find in rooting around all this muck for you.

Also to drop this. Contact me with demos.

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.

Itchy’s SFW Masturbation Chair

13 Jan 2016 by Christopher Noessel

With the salacious introduction, “Itchy, I know what you’d like,” Saun Dann reveals himself as a peddler of not just booby trapped curling irons, but also softcore erotica! The Life Day gift he gives to the old Wookie is a sexy music video for his immersive media chair.

The chair sits in the family living room, and has a sort of helmet fixed in place such that Itchy can sit down and rest his head within it. On the outside of the helmet are lights that continuously blink out of sync with each other and seem unrelated to the actual function of the chair. Maybe a fairy-lights power indicator?

Saun first powers the device by inserting a “proton pack” into the back of the chair. This is kind of strange since none of the other devices seen in the home require batteries or charging. Are they lower power so batteries last longer? Is there an unseen electrical infrastructure but that monitors any plugged in object for illegal-device signatures? Whatever the reason, the battery pack plugs in and the chair comes to life.

An elderly man stands beside a creature resembling a Wookiee, seated under a hair dryer, in a cozy room filled with various objects.

Close-up of a hand operating a vintage camera, with a focus on the camera's recording mechanism and a blurred background.

When Itchy sits down, he rests his head in the helmet, and Saun puts a media cartridge into a tray sticking out of the armrest. There is a single red button on the forward edge. He then engages the cartridge by slapping it on edge so the tray slides into a recess. Then he lowers the forehead plate of the helmet over Itchy, who sits back to enjoy the show. Saun wishes him, “Happy Life Day!” and then with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink-you-know-seeeeexxxxx tone in his voice, leans in to reiterate, “And I do mean Happy Life Day!”

Itchy punches the top of the armrest with his hairy finger, and the media plays, full of theremin meanderings, stage lights and spandex dancers shot through a kaleidoscope-refraction lens, and a scantily-feathered singer (IMDB tells me the character name is Mermeia Holographic Wow, played by the diva Diahann Carroll) who purrs out a full 5 minutes of mind-numbing introduction before a 4-minute musical number. You can almost hear the director saying over a soggily-chewed stogie, “Sorry, Diahann, but we don’t have a lot to work with, here, you’re really going to have to stretch this out.”

I know you’re searching for me
Searching
Searching
I am here
My voice is for you alone
I am found in your eyes only
I exist for you
I am in your mind
As you create me
Oh yes
I can feel my creation
{Giggle}
I’m getting your message
Are you getting mine?

Itchy growls and spasms in his chair enthusiastically.

Oh, oh! We are excited aren’t we?
Well just relax
Just relax
Yes

{More Itchy grunting}

Now
We can have a good time
Can’t we?

{spasming, panting}

I’ll tell you a secret
I find you adorable

Itchy loves this assertion so much that he punches a control on the armrest, and the playback jumps back to replay the line again. And again. And again. Four times in total.

(I find you adorable)
(I find you adorable)
(I find you adorable)
I don’t need to ask how you found me
You see, I am your fantasy
I am your experience
So experience me
I am your pleasure
So enjoy me
This is our moment together in time
That we might turn this moment an eternity

{Music mercifully begins}

SWHS-Chair-07 — I’m sorry to have to remind people about this low point in your career, Diahann.

So…Exactly what is this machine?

So, if the words of the recording are to be believed, this machine automatically reads the mind (or stored preferences) of its user to create a custom, on-the-fly immersive video.

Here you should note that Itchy’s species of sexual preference is human, not Wookie, and then note with sadness that Chewie is not mixed-species. Itchy is living an unfulfilled life.

If it constructs its visions on-the-fly, then what is the cartridge for? It can’t be Itchy’s preferences. Why would Saun have them? My best guess is that the cartridge contains the template of the song, This Minute Now, and the device reads the wearer’s in-the-moment preferences to pick the avatar that sings it. That template isn’t neutral, though. It has to be a sexy template, because Saun does all the nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat routine. Aww, yeah, sexy template for Life Day.

Knowing that this might be a privately-observed sexytime moment, I’d recommend the designers add a curtain or perhaps situate the chair inside a private chamber to make the user less exposed. Otherwise it might be awkward—for a human user at least—for other members of the family to observe him becoming visibly and audibly aroused (the panting), much less do…uh…anything about it. Of course I don’t know Wookie social rules, so this might be well within their social norms. Kinda makes you wonder about how Chewie spends his idle time on the Falcon in front of Han. “Chewie. Do you mind? Take it into your berth!”

Controls

The instant replay feature is useful to the task. And it’s quite well executed, since it’s a quick-to-press button to replay the last moment, and that moment is of unspecified length. The media must have very sophisticated and detailed markup for a “repeat that bit” to work, and it does. Of course, it also can read Itchy’s mind, so maybe it just knows to play across the most-recent high-excitement part. It’s a self-administered dopamine hit.

A better tool might monitor the user’s brainwaves for a perfect combination of tension and release to ensure a perfectly satisfying experience. No button needed. That would also alleviate the problem that the user’s hand might be otherwise engaged during the exciting part to try and target a button. The (prolly NSFW text, even if it’s WebMD) sexual response cycle of humans is a known thing, so surely a Wookie’s is too. Let me disturb you by visualizing the combination of concepts so implied.

But we also have to ask after the placement and purpose of that sole red button. Saun slapped the cartridge edge-on to lodge the tray in place. But that’s where the button is. Did the lodging activate the play, or did pressing the button?

If the cartridge, what does the button do? (Not replay, Itchy clearly presses the top of the armrest for that.) And how does it avoid accidental activation while being slapped in?

If the button, why have the tray slide in and out? To keep it private? Sorry, you lost that battle with the living room masturbatorium. To protect the media? Then why have it in the armrest where it’s sure to be subject to the bangings of Wookie demands for again!?

A man with long hair and a mustache is lying in the backseat of a car. He is wearing a shiny, dark outfit and has wires attached to his head, appearing disoriented.

A man in a white lab coat is reclined, eyes closed, under a red-lit medical apparatus with a tube extending toward him.

With the commercial release of Oculus Rift just about to ship post-CES, let’s not turn to this device for any immersive-media lessons. There is better blind-use masturbation VR in Strange Days, more dystopic ones in THX-1138 (yes, I now realize, it’s a recurring Lucas theme), more private ones in Sleeper, and less creepy things almost anywhere you turn.

Let’s just let Itchy have his personalized-avatar, happy Life Day, there, in the middle of the astroturfed family room.

Stay classy, Star Wars Holiday Special.

Chef Gormaand

6 Jan 2016 by Christopher Noessel

Hello, readers. Hope your Life Days went well. The blog is kicking off 2016 by continuing to take the Star Wars universe down another peg, here, at this heady time of its revival. Yes, yes, I’ll get back to The Avengers soon. But for now, someone’s in the kitchen with Malla.

After she loses 03:37 of her life calmly eavesviewing a transaction at a local variety shop, she sets her sights on dinner. She walks to the kitchen and rifles through some translucent cards on the counter. She holds a few up to the light to read something on them, doesn’t like what she sees, and picks up another one. Finding something she likes, she inserts the card into a large flat panel display on the kitchen counter. (Don’t get too excited about this being too prescient. WP tells me models existed back in the 1950s.)

In response, a prerecorded video comes up on the screen from a cooking show, in which the quirky and four-armed Chef Gourmaand shows how to prepare the succulent “Bantha Surprise.”

And that’s it for the interaction. None of the four dials on the base of the screen are touched throughout the five minutes of the cooking show. It’s quite nice that she didn’t have to press play at all, but that’s a minor note.

The main thing to talk about is how nice the physical tokens are as a means of finding a recipe. We don’t know exactly what’s printed on them, but we can tell it’s enough for her to pick through, consider, and make a decision. This is nice for the very physical environment of the kitchen.

This sort of tangible user interface, card-as-media-command hasn’t seen a lot of play in the scifiinterfaces survey, and the only other example that comes to mind is from Aliens, when Ripley uses Carter Burke’s calling card to instantly call him AND I JUST CONNECTED ALIENS TO THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL.

Of course an augmented reality kitchen might have done even more for her, like…

Cross-referencing ingredients on hand (say it with me: slab of tender Bantha loin) with food preferences, family and general ratings, budget, recent meals to avoid repeats, health concerns, and time constraints to populate the tangible cards with choices that fit the needs of the moment, saving her from even having to consider recipes that won’t work;
Make the material of the cards opaque so she can read them without holding them up to a light source;
Augmenting the surfaces with instructional graphics (or even air around her with volumetric projections) to show her how to do things in situ rather than having to keep an eye on an arbitrary point in her kitchen;
Slowed down when it was clear Malla wasn’t keeping up, or automatically translated from a four-armed to a two-armed description;
Shown a visual representation of the whole process and the current point within it;

…but then Harvey wouldn’t have had his moment. And for your commitment to the bit, Harvey, we thank you.

The Groomer

23 Dec 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The groomer is a device for sale at the Wookie Planet Trading Post C by local proprietor Saun Dann. (It was named long before the evil pederast sense came to common use.) It looks like a dust brush with an OXO designed, black, easy-grip handle, with a handful of small silver pushbuttons on one side (maybe…three?), and a handful of black buttons on the other (again, maybe three). It’s kind of hard to call it exactly, since this is lower-res than a recompressed I Can Haz Cheezburger jpg.

Let’s hear Saun describe it to the vaguely menacing Imperial shopper in his store.

Besides shaving and hair trimming, it’s guaranteed to lift stains off clothing, faces, and hands. Cleans teeth, fingers and toenails, washes eyes, pierces ears, calculates, modulates, syncopates life rhythms, and can repeat the Imperial Penal Code—all 17 volumes— in half the time of the old XP-21. Just the thing to keep you squeaky clean.

There are so many, many problems with this thing. On every level it’s wretched.

A character in a black helmet holds a futuristic device while interacting with an elderly man in a casual outfit, set in a brightly colored interior.

A man in a dark helmet stands next to another man holding a small object, likely a weapon, while surrounded by a colorful, cluttered backdrop.

There are lots of product definition problems, of course, (e.g. worse feature bloat than iTunes) but these are issues for scifiproductdesign.com.

And there’s way too much ambiguity in the description, too. For instance, does it (calculate like a calculator), (modulate like a scientific calculator) and (syncopate life rhythms like a metronome)? Or does it (calculate life rhythms) and (modulate life rhythms) and (syncopate life rhythms)? What would any of that mean? Filed for scifiproductmanuals.com.

And is the Imperial Code thing supposed to be a joke? At first you think it’s a dig at this cog of the executive branch for some oppressive legislation enacted by the fascist political regime that gave him his license to menace, haha classic Saun Dann, but then he follows it with an actual performance metric comparison to a prior product version, which is named by model number. So it’s meant to be real? Scificomedywriting.com is still up for grabs, variety show writers from the 70s.

But for the interface questions…where to begin? How do the paucity of controls map to functions? Why are they undifferentiated? Where are the shaving bits? Why are the push controls covering the grip handle?

Which takes us to the darkest aspect of the product: as a single throwaway mention, hidden amongst distraction text, Saun says that it can pierce. Note that with the very poorly placed controls, there are no easy gaurds against accidental activation. It’s almost like it was meant to be a terribly designed, dangerous thing, as liable to leave a gaping hole in your tongue as prepare you for a visit to a dentist.

Because of its terrible industrial design, pointless features, and lawsuit-ready interface, I posit that this object is not something Saun has out to sell to beloved Wookie regulars. It’s something like a Chinese Finger Trap. Cruel shoes. A violent-joke product, only to be brought out when Imperial shoppers patronize the store, in the hopes that they would waste their time on pseudoscience, be forced to confront their own bureaucracy, and ultimately, accidentally pierce themselves in unspeakable places.

Way to subvert, shopkeep.

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

Category Archives: Star Wars (franchise)