After selecting its location from a map, Johnny is now in front of the virtual entrance to the hotel. The virtual Beijing has a new color scheme, mostly orange with some red.
The “entrance” is another tetrahedral shape made from geometric blocks. It is actually another numeric keypad. Johnny taps the blocks to enter a sequence of numbers.
The tetrahedral keypad
Note that there can be more than one digit within a block. I mentioned earlier that it can be difficult to “press” with precision in virtual reality due to the lack of tactile feedback. Looking closely, here the fingers of Johnny’s “hands” cast a shadow on the pyramid, making depth perception easier.
Something is wrong, and Johnny receives an electric shock.
He reacts as if the shock is real, pulling his hands back and cursing.
In the 1980s and 1990s cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer and Hardwired and roleplaying games such as Cyberpunk and ShadowRun suggested that future virtual reality systems would be able to physically attack users, the dreaded “Black ICE”. While the more vigilant Internet copyright enforcers would probably be in favour, it seems unlikely that the liability lawyers at any computer manufacturer would allow a product that could electrocute users to be released, or that users would agree to put something like that on their hands. So this is most likely just Johnny expressing the same frustration as a current day video gamer who loses a life in a first person shooter.
The last necessary step before being granted access is, for some reason, to reshape the pyramid.
Here the pyramid serves as a combination lock or puzzle as well as a keypad. It’s not obvious, but Johnny does make a small 3D rotating gesture on the entire pyramid before pulling and pushing blocks around. You can also see a second layer of structure underneath the moving shapes.
Is this an effective security system? Not really. Two-factor authentication systems rely both on knowingsomething, here a numeric code, and either havingsomething, such as a specific mobile phone or token generator, or beingsomeone, with a specific fingerprint. Reshaping the blocks is just a second thing the would-be user must know, and is just as vulnerable to being guessed as the numeric code. On the other hand, it might be enough to keep out simple-minded attacks that only try the first step.
The floorplan
The “interior” of the hotel site is first displayed as a flat plan view. This builds up incrementally, a transition known among VR developers since the film Tron came out as “rezzing up”. The completed plan then rotates into a 3D structure.
We hear the voice feedback announce “General accounts selected” but don’t see how Johnny did this. A window expands out, and Johnny splits it in half to reveal some tabular data.
The fax and phone records are displayed in a simple tabular view, which would not look out of place on any 1995 or indeed current day desktop computer spreadsheet. There’s no need to use 3D graphics for such this.
There are new interface elements here, overlaying the tabular data in pink. At the top we can read SEARCH > FAX CHARGES: FOUND. And on the right is a set of inscrutable numbers with headings GRID, LEVEL, MENU, and XYZ. This could be some orientation within the data, but it doesn’t make sense. In the lower-left we see a label for elevation, with data as “coordinates in sector 4.”
Below that a 9-key arrangement with arrow shapes. Perhaps this is a navigation aid for people using conventional 2D desktop interfaces rather than full virtual reality equipment, allowing them to move around by clicking the onscreen arrows or pressing the equivalent keys. If the keys are similar to those used in computer games, the up and down arrow keys move forward or backwards and the left and right keys rotate, assuming movement is predominantly in the horizontal plane. The other keys might be for banking or vertical movement.
Johnny searches for the outgoing fax. He does not use any graphical gestures for this, instead specifying the search date and time ranges by speaking. Words and operators are more precise than graphic symbols for this kind of database query, but typing on a virtual keyboard would be more awkward than speech.
When the particular table cell is found, he uses the fingertips of both hands to expand the contents, one of the standard gestures described in the Make It So book.
Not surprisingly for a Beijing hotel, the internal records are not in English. Johnny again uses a voice command to ask for translation.
The hotel record is just the metadata, not the actual images he’s looking for, suggesting that “fax” system is fully digital and the faxes themselves are treated like modern email messages and deleted once sent. The metadata does tell Johnny that the images were faxed to a online copyshop in Newark. Since it is network connected, Johnny can jump straight to it in cyberspace.
The miniseries represents the best that the reboot has to offer. Its story is contained, the characters fill their roles, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The miniseries even ends on a solid cliffhanger: Will humanity survive?
Battlestar Galactica also picked a rarely chosen theme for its run. The well-used and anachronistic technology was in direct opposition to the Star Wars Prequels being released at the time. After getting my feet wet with my previous reviews, this was an entertaining choice because of its difficulty, detail, and setting.
I was constantly reminded during the review process that this miniseries represented—and this can’t be stated strongly enough—the end of human civilization.
Sci: A (4 of 4) How believable are the interfaces?
While there are usability concerns for most of the interfaces, they all feel like they belong on the Galactica. The low tech of the buttons, controls, and screens all fit the world. The interfaces aboard the Galactica also feel quite military in their severity and practicality. The interfaces aboard the non-military ships feel quite civilian.
The characters accept their tech for the clunky anachronisms that it is, and you can often feel them yearning for the newer tech that is likely prevalent in the rest of the human fleet, even though it’s the low tech that spared them from the same fate as the rest of the colonies.
Full marks for the believability of the interfaces in the miniseries.
Fi: A (4 of 4) How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story?
Battlestar Galactica is two stories. The first is of the characters and their fight for survival. The second is of their technology: Both the sophisticated tech that has evolved beyond all ken and come back to kill them, and the creaking, older technology by which they survive that assault and the hazards of space.
The interfaces support and inform the narrative to a degree not seen in other properties. Without the Galactica, and her tech, Battlestar Galactica would have been a lesser show.
Interfaces: C (2 of 4) How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
Here the interfaces don’t fare as well. Captain Adama and his senior staff spend the entire miniseries interacting with other characters through the interface of the CIC.
These interfaces are blunt and simple, befitting their role of unhackable state machines, but often go too far in their simplicity. They force unnecessary effort onto users. They’re poorer models for us in the real world, even as low-tech, because it doesn’t concern itself with usability. Take caution when looking to this series to inform your own work.
Final Grade A- (10 of 12), Blockbuster.
Low tech doesn’t have to mean low usability. We have access now to research and methods that can improve even the simplest of tools (see: SMART Design’s ergonomic needle). The Galactica reminds us that, ultimately, people are the ones using our interfaces and who will struggle with them for years (or decades) after their introduction.
While the 4-season series might have its critics, the 2003 miniseries remains a classic of science fiction. BattlestarGalactica is a look into a used future that any of us might be forced into designing, because of a crisis.
Perhaps the most unusual interface in the film is a game seen when Theo visits his cousin Nigel for a meal and to ask for a favor. Nigel’s son Alex sits at the table silent and distant, his attention on a strange game that it’s designer, Mark Coleran, tells me is called “Kubris,” a 3D hybrid of Tetris and Rubik’s Cube.
Alex operates the game by twitching and sliding his fingers in the air. With each twitch a small twang is heard. He suspends his hand a bit above the table to have room. His finger movements are tracked by thin black wires that extend from small plastic discs at his fingertips back to a device worn on his wrist. This device looks like a streamlined digital watch, but where the face of a clock would be are a set of multicolored LEDs arranged in rows. These LEDs flicker on and off in inscrutable patterns, but clearly showing some state of the game. There is an inset LED block that also displays an increasing score.
The game also features a small, transparent, flat screen that rests on the table in front of him. It displays a computer-generated cube, similar to a 5×5 Rubik’s Cube, made up of smaller transparent cubes that share colors with the LEDs on his wrist. As Alex plays, he changes the orientation of the cube, and positions smaller cubes along the surface of the larger.
Alex plays this game continually during the course of the scene. He is so engrossed in it that when Nigel asks him twice to take his pills, he doesnt even register the instruction. Nigel must yell at him to get Alex to comply.
Though the exact workings of the game are a mystery, it serves to illustrate in a technological way how some of the younger people in 2027 disengage from the horror of the world through games that have been designed for addiction and obsession.
Cyberspace is usually considered to be a 3D spatial representation of the Internet, an expansion of the successful 2D desktop metaphor. The representation of cyberspace used in books such as Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and by the film Hackers released in the same year, is an abstract cityscape where buildings represent organisations or individual computers, and this what we see in Johnny Mnemonic. How does Johnny navigate through this virtual city?
Gestures and words for flying
Once everything is connected up, Johnny starts his journey with an unfolding gesture. He then points both fingers forward. From his point of view, he is flying through cyberspace. He then holds up both hands to stop.
Both these gestures were commonly used in the prototype VR systems of 1995. They do however conflict with the more common gestures for manipulating objects in volumetric projections that are described in Make It So chapter 5. It will be interesting to see which set of gestures is eventually adopted, or whether they can co-exist.
Later we will see Johnny turn and bank by moving his hands independently.
We also see him using voice commands, saying “hold it” to stop forward motion immediately. Later we see him stretch one arm out and bring it back, apparently reversing a recent move.
In cyberpunk and related fiction users fly everywhere in cyberspace, a literal interpretation of the spatial metaphor. This is also how users in our real world MUD and MOO cyberspaces start. After a while, travelling through all the intermediate locations between your start and destination gets tedious. MUDs and MOOs allow teleporting, a direct jump to the desired location, and the cyberspace in Johnny Mnemonic has a similar capability.
Gestures for teleporting
Mid sequence, Johnny wants to jump to the Beijing hotel where the upload took place. To do this, he uses a blue geometric shape at the lower left of his view, looking like a high tech, floating tetrahedron. Johnny slowly spins this virtual object using repeated flicking gestures with his left hand, with his ring and middle fingers held together.
It looks very similar to the gesture used on a current-day smartphone to flick through a photo album or set of application icon screens. And in this case, it causes a blue globe to float into view (see below).
Johnny grabs this globe and unfolds it into a fullscreen window, using the standard Hollywood two handed “spread” gesture described in Chapter 5 of Make It So.
The final world map fills the entire screen. Johnny uses his left hand to enter a number on a HUD style overlay keypad, then taps on the map to indicate China.
I interpret this as Johnny using the hotel phone number to specify his destination. It would not be unusual for there to be multiple hotels with the same name within a city such as Beijing, but the phone number should be unique. But since Johnny is currently in North America, he must also specify the international dialing code or 2021 equivalent, which he can do just by pointing. And this is a well-designed user interface which accepts not only multimodal input, but in any order, rather than forcing the user to enter the country code first.
Keyboards and similar physical devices often don’t translate well into virtual reality, because tactile feedback is non-existent. Even touch typists need the feeling of the physical keyboard, in particular the slight concavity of the key tops and the orientation bumps on the F and J keys, to keep their fingers aligned. Here though there is just a small grid of virtual numbers which doesn’t require extended typing. Otherwise this is a good design, allowing Johnny to type a precise number and just point to a larger target.
Next
After he taps a location, the zoomrects indicate a transition into a new cyberspace, in this case, Beijing.
While recording a podcast with the guys at DecipherSciFi about the twee(n) love story The Space Between Us, we spent some time kvetching about how silly it was that many of the scenes involved Gardner, on Mars, in a real-time text chat with a girl named Tulsa, on Earth. It’s partly bothersome because throughout the rest of the the movie, the story tries for a Mohs sci-fi hardness of, like, 1.5, somewhere between Real Life and Speculative Science, so it can’t really excuse itself through the Applied Phlebotinum that, say, Star Wars might use. The rest of the film feels like it’s trying to have believable science, but during these scenes it just whistles, looks the other way, and hopes you don’t notice that the two lovebirds are breaking the laws of physics as they swap flirt emoji.
Hopefully unnecessary science brief: Mars and Earth are far away from each other. Even if the communications transmissions are sent at light speed between them, it takes much longer than the 1 second of response time required to feel “instant.” How much longer? It depends. The planets orbit the sun at different speeds, so aren’t a constant distance apart. At their closest, it takes light 3 minutes to travel between Mars and Earth, and at their farthest—while not being blocked by the sun—it takes about 21 minutes. A round-trip is double that. So nothing akin to real-time chat is going to happen.
But I’m a designer, a sci-fi apologist, and a fairly talented backworlder. I want to make it work. And perhaps because of my recent dive into narrow AI, I began to realize that, well, in a way, maybe it could. It just requires rethinking what’s happening in the chat.
Let’s first acknowledge that we’ve solved long distance communications a long time ago. Gardner and Tulsa could just, you know, swap letters or, like the characters in 2001: A Space Odyssey, recorded video messages. There. Problem solved. It’s not real-time interaction, but it gets the job done. But kids aren’t so much into pen pals anymore, and we have to acknowledge that Gardner doesn’t want to tip his hand that he’s on Mars (it’s a grave NASA secret, for plot reasons). So the question is how could we make it work so it feels like a real time chat to her. Let’s first solve it for the case where he’s trying to disguise his location, and then how it might work when both participants are in the know.
Fooling Tulsa
Since 1984 (ping me, as always, if you can think of an earlier reference) sci-fi has had the notion of a digitally-replicated personality. Here I’m thinking of Gibson’s Neuromancer and the RAM boards on which Dixie Flatline “lives.” These RAM boards house an interactive digital personality of a person, built out of a lifetime of digital traces left behind: social media, emails, photos, video clips, connections, expressed interests, etc. Anyone in that story could hook the RAM board up to a computer, and have conversations with the personality housed there that would closely approximate how that person would (or would have) respond in real life.
Listen to the podcast for a mini-rant on translucent screens, followed by apologetics.
Is this likely to actually happen? Well it kind of already is. Here in the real world, we’re seeing early, crude “me bots” populate the net which are taking baby steps toward the same thing. (See MessinaBot, https://bottr.me/, https://sensay.it/, the forthcoming http://bot.me/) By the time we actually get a colony to Mars (plus the 16 years for Gardner to mature), mebot technology should should be able to stand in for him convincingly enough in basic online conversations.
Training the bot
So in the story, he would look through cached social media feeds to find a young lady he wanted to strike up a conversation with, and then ask his bot-maker engine to look at her public social media to build a herBot with whom he could chat, to train it for conversations. During this training, the TulsaBot would chat about topics of interest gathered from her social media. He could pause the conversation to look up references or prepare convincing answers to the trickier questions TulsaBot asks. He could also add some topics to the conversation they might have in common, and questions he might want to ask her. By doing this, his GardnerBot isn’t just some generic thing he sends out to troll any young woman with. It’s a more genuine, interactive first “letter” sent directly to her. He sends this GardnerBot to servers on Earth.
A demonstration of a chat with a short Martian delay. (Yes, it’s an animated gif.)
Launching the bot
GardnerBot would wait until it saw Tulsa online and strike up the conversation with her. It would send a signal back to Gardner that the chat has begun so he can sit on his end and read a space-delayed transcript of the chat. GardnerBot would try its best to manage the chat based on what it knows about awkward teen conversation, Turing test best practices, what it knows about Gardner, and how it has been trained specifically for Tulsa. Gardner would assuage some of his guilt by having it dodge and carefully frame the truth, but not outright lie.
Buying time
If during the conversation she raised a topic or asked a question for which GardnerBot was not trained, it could promise an answer later, and then deflect, knowing that it should pad the conversation in the meantime:
Ask her to answer the same question first, probing into details to understand rationale and buy more time
Dive down into a related subtopic in which the bot has confidence, and which promises to answer the initial question
Deflect conversation to another topic in which it has a high degree of confidence and lots of detail to share
Text a story that Gardner likes to tell that is known to take about as long as the current round-trip signal
Example
TULSA
OK, here’s one: If you had to live anywhere on Earth where they don’t speak English, where would you live?
GardnerBot has a low confidence that it knows Gardner’s answer. It could respond…
(you first) “Oh wow. That is a tough one. Can I have a couple of minutes to think about it? I promise I’ll answer, but you tell me yours first.”
(related subtopic) “I’m thinking about this foreign movie that I saw one time. There were a lot of animals in it and a waterfall. Does that sound familiar?”
(new topic) “What? How am I supposed to answer that one? 🙂 Umm…While I think about it, tell me…what kind of animal would you want to be reincarnated as. And you have to say why.”
(story delay) “Ha. Sure, but can I tell a story first? When I was a little kid, I used to be obsessed with this music that I would hear drifting into my room from somewhere around my house…”
Lagged-realtime training
Each of those responses is a delay tactic that allows the chat transcript to travel to Mars for Gardner to do some bot training on the topic. He would be watching the time-delayed transcript of the chat, keeping an eye on an adjacent track of data containing the meta information about what the bot is doing, conversationally speaking. When he saw it hit low-confidence or high-stakes topic and deflect, it would provide a chat window for him to tell the GardnerBot what it should do or say.
To the stalling GARDNERBOT…
GARDNER
For now, I’m going to pick India, because it’s warm and I bet I would really like the spicy food and the rain. Whatever that colored powder festival is called. I’m also interested in their culture, Bollywood, and Hinduism.
As he types, the message travels back to Earth where GardnerBot begins to incorporate his answers to the chat…
At a natural break in the conversation…
GARDNERBOT
OK. I think I finally have an answer to your earlier question. How about…India?
TULSA
India?
GARDNERBOT
Think about it! Running around in warm rain. Or trying some of the street food under an umbrella. Have you seen youTube videos from that festival with the colored powder everywhere? It looks so cool. Do you know what it’s called?
Note that the bot could easily look it up and replace “that festival with the colored powder everywhere” with “Holi Festival of Color” but it shouldn’t. Gardner doesn’t know that fact, so the bot shouldn’t pretend it knows it. A Cyrano-de-Bergerac software—where it makes him sound more eloquent, intelligent, or charming than he really is to woo her—would be a worse kind of deception. Gardner wants to hide where he is, not who he is.
That said, Gardner should be able to direct the bot, to change its tactics. “OMG. GardnerBot! You’re getting too personal! Back off!” It might not be enough to cover a flub made 42 minutes ago, but of course the bot should know how to apologize on Gardner’s behalf and ask conversational forgiveness.
Gotta go
If the signal to Mars got interrupted or the bot got into too much trouble with pressure to talk about low confidence or high stakes topics, it could use a believable, pre-rolled excuse to end the conversation.
GARDNERBOT
Oh crap. Will you be online later? I’ve got chores I have to do.
Then, Gardner could chat with TulsaBot on his end without time pressure to refine GardnerBot per their most recent topics, which would be sent back to Earth servers to be ready for the next chat.
In this way he could have “chats” with Tulsa that are run by a bot but quite custom to the two of them. It’s really Gardner’s questions, topics, jokes, and interest, but a bot-managed delivery of these things.
So it could work, does it fit the movie? I think so. It would be believable because he’s a nerd raised by scientists. He made his own robot, why not his own bot?
From the audience’s perspective, it might look like they’re chatting in real time, but subtle cues on Gardner’s interface reward the diligent with hints that he’s watching a time delay. Maybe the chat we see in the film is even just cleverly edited to remove the bots.
How he manages to hide this data stream from NASA to avoid detection is another question better handled by someone else.
An honest version: bot envoy
So that solves the logic from the movie’s perspective but of course it’s still squickish. He is ultimately deceiving her. Once he returns to Mars and she is back on Earth, could they still use the same system, but with full knowledge of its botness? Would real world astronauts use it?
Would it be too fake?
I don’t think it would be too fake. Sure, the bot is not the real person, but neither are the pictures, videos, and letters we fondly keep with us as we travel far from home. We know they’re just simulacra, souvenir likenesses of someone we love. We don’t throw these away in disgust for being fakes. They are precious because they are reminders of the real thing. So would the themBot.
GARDNER
Hey, TulsaBot. Remember when we were knee deep in the Pacific Ocean? I was thinking about that today.
TULSABOT
I do. It’s weird how it messes with your sense of balance, right? Did you end up dreaming about it later? I sometimes do after being in waves a long time.
GARDNER
I can’t remember, but someday I hope to come back to Earth and feel it again. OK. I have to go, but let me know how training is going. Have you been on the G machine yet?
Nicely, you wouldn’t need stall tactics in the honest version. Or maybe it uses them, but can be called out.
TULSA
GardnerBot, you don’t have to stall. Just tell Gardner to watch Mission to Mars and update you. Because it’s hilarious and we have to go check out the face when I’m there.
Sending your loved one the transcript will turn it into a kind of love letter. The transcript could even be appended with a letter that jokes about the bot. The example above was too short for any semi-realtime insertions in the text, but maybe that would encourage longer chats. Then the bot serves as charming filler, covering the delays between real contact.
Ultimately, yes, I think we can backworld what looks physics-breaking into something that makes sense, and might even be a new kind of interactive memento between interplanetary sweethearts, family, and friends.
Note to readers: The author and editor of this series of posts would like to be Matrix-style cool, competent, stylishly-dressed world-changers with superhuman abilities. In reality we are much closer to the protagonists of Johnny Mnemonic: always frantically improvising to stay one step ahead of disaster with a mix of clunky technology. (And we don’t even have a cybernetic dolphin helping out.) So, um, yeah. This post is out of order. Sorry. Please pretend you haven’t read Cyberspace: the Hardware yet. OK. On to an analysis of the phone system.
The video phones in Johnny Mnemonic all seem easy to use and reliable, but this is generally true of all phones in film and TV, video or otherwise. The audience want to see the characters communicate, not struggle with technology – unless difficulty or failure is necessary for the plot!
Rather than look at individual devices, I think it is more interesting to consider the video phone system as a whole. In Johnny Mnemonic the user experience of the phone system is more a software service than a hardware device.
In the film, phones range in size from the giant wall-mount screens to Shinji’s tiny handheld device, and from fixed locations to moving vehicles or handheld. Any computing and display device, wired or wireless, can act as a phone. The system has followed the same evolution as the web-based applications such as Facebook and GMail we use today that are available anywhere there is a web browser. The Internet makes ubiquitous software services possible.
The alternative path, which with the benefit of hindsight we can see is what happened with our current day phones, is personal devices. Instead of expecting computing devices running software to be available everywhere, we have one hardware device with our software on it that we carry everywhere instead. (Obviously this is over-simplifying a bit: the mobile phone system does require cell towers and/or base stations!) It’s an interesting choice for designers.
The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Within the film we see Takahashi using a hand tracker, a specialised piece of hardware built into his desk, to control a puppet avatar, a real time photorealistic avatar. Nobody else seems to have such capability, nor does Johnny consider the possibility that the person he is talking to might not be real. This gives Takahashi an advantage over others – but only while he makes all phone calls from his desk.
Why does the phone system still exist?
Current day phones, including the few remaining public phone booths, are all dedicated devices. Even though our mobile phones have become portable computers, the phone capability is still restricted to a manufacturer-installed application. In Johnny Mnemonic the phone system is more like the Ethernet jacks in a hotel room or convention centre, allowing users to connect their own devices. Since every call appears to be digital and is recorded in cyberspace, why have a phone network with numbers instead of, say, email addresses?
While the phone system in Johnny Mnemonic is very flexible in how numbers can be dialed and what can be used as video and audio sources, we only see it used for video phone calls, nothing else. Convergence of the phone system and Internet is often predicted but hasn’t happened because the one advantage that phone networks have is low latency and guaranteed resource allocation. Current day phone calls don’t have the occasional stuttering or delays that occasionally affect Skype sessions. (Your non-Internet phone call may be cut off entirely, but it won’t slow down.) In 2021, the phone system may be entirely digital and with video added, but still carrying traffic on separate, dedicated links to ensure quality.
At the time of writing WebRTC, a collection of standards for Web Real-Time Communication including audio and video, is starting to appear in prototype form in widely available browser software. Perhaps by 2021 the future phone system of Johnny Mnemonic will seem much more realistic.
And finally we come to the often-promised cyberspace search sequence, my favourite interface in the film. It starts at 36:30 and continues, with brief interruptions to the outside world, to 41:00. I’ll admit there are good reasons not to watch the entire film, but if you are interested in interface design, this will be five minutes well spent. Included here are the relevant clips, lightly edited to focus on the user interfaces.
Johnny and Jane have broken into a neighbourhood computer shop, which in 2021 will have virtual reality gear just as today even the smallest retailer has computer mice. Johnny clears miscellaneous parts off a table and then sits down, donning a headset and datagloves.
Headset
Headsets haven’t really changed much since 1995 when this film was made. Barring some breakthrough in neural interfaces, they remain the best way to block off the real world and immerse a user into the virtual world of the computer. It’s mildly confusing to a current day audience to hear Johnny ask for “eyephones”, which in 1995 was the name of a particular VR headset rather than the popular “iPhone” of today.
Throughout this cyberspace sequence the virtual reality system Johnny uses gives vocal feedback, usually just confirming what has happened or repeating information visible in cyberspace. Johnny will also use voice commands himself. Jane seemingly can’t hear this feedback, as she has no idea what is happening other than what Johnny tells her. No earbuds or headphones are visible, but nearly all headsets then and now incorporate audio output as well as visual display so presumably sound is the function of the silver bulges at the back of the headset.
Dataglove
Datagloves are less common today. These track the position and orientation of the hands as they move, in this particular case to the bending of individual fingers. In 1995 this was done with magnetic or ultrasonic trackers on each hand and various fibre optic or potentiometer bend sensors on the finger joints, all built into a rather bulky glove. Today this can be done passively by a video camera, for example the Microsoft Kinect or Leap Motion Controller. With these technologies it’s not even necessary to paint dots on the fingers, which unlike faces have convenient gaps in between the points of interest.
Johnny mostly keeps his arms horizontal just above the table surface, but we will occasionally see him reach up. As chapter 5 of Make It So points out, trying to operate a vertical touch screen or gesture interface for any length of time is exhausting, and the same would be true if the VR system required him to frequently lift his hands and arms above the conventional keyboard height.
System status
There is also a system status display on the table.
Various indicators light up as Johnny gets ready. It would be helpful if this were mirrored to the headset, so Johnny could at least see which components are working or not without removing it.
My first impression was that the grid on the table might be some kind of optical tracking aid. Then I remembered that this is a worktable, and protective table mats with a grid pattern printed on them are sold in craft and hardware shops. Not everything in the future needs to be advanced technology.
Voice feedback
As Johnny performs his various actions in cyberspace, another synthesized voice gives him constant feedback, most often telling him which actions and objects have been selected. I suggest this is for new users, who may be confused about exactly what they can and cannot do in virtual reality. (Of course, it is also very useful for telling us the audience what is happening.) Johnny himself is not a new VR users, but since this is a system assembled straight out of the box he gets the default setting. Over time a voice constantly telling you what you’ve done probably becomes irritating, which is why earlier systems were not so chatty.
The tracker
We see a second person in cyberspace during this sequence, although only briefly. This is the Pharmakom tracker, who is trying to locate Johnny and Jane for the Yakuza.
He too wears a headset and gloves, but also has a one piece earphone and microphone. He uses this not for voice commands, but for a phone connection to Shinji, the Yakuza leader in a car.
He is standing in front of a lectern type display.
This shows a street map, with the red cross hairs presumably the location being examined. Current day VR systems often mirror what the headset is showing to a more conventional display as this is very useful in testing and debugging. Note also the rows of unmarked buttons on either side. I’ll discuss these and similar buttons below.
Having him stand is an interesting choice. The advantage of standing in VR is that it allows the participant to bend and turn more freely, using body motion as an input as well as hands and head. The disadvantages are that this is more tiring, and that with the headset blocking the real world, it’s very easy to bump into things. The first commercial VR game, “Dactyl Nightmare” by W Industries, had a waist-high padded fence around the player to stop them falling over or walking too far and breaking the cables.
Here the tracker is risking a painful bruised knee. Perhaps he is a standing desk enthusiast who believes the other health benefits make it worthwhile.
The Curious Unmarked Buttons…
A recurring hardware interface in Johnny Mnemonic is the grid of unmarked buttons. There were two in the upload hotel suite, the image grabber, and the fax machine. And here the lectern display used by the tracker has more of the same.
I can’t recall any others like this, with one exception: the Pixar animated short “Lifted”, which has a vast array of unmarked identical switches. But that was a deliberate caricature, making fun of terribly designed and confusing interfaces.
Research tells us that labelled buttons and keys are the best for learning and use, from computers and phones to their software equivalents on modern touchscreen phones. Even the buttons on consumer remote controls are marked, however cryptic the symbols may be. The only unmarked buttons in current day regular use are those used around the edges of displays for ATMs and in aircraft cockpits. Here the meaning of these “soft buttons” will be shown by the text or graphic displayed nearby.
Image by the author
But this isn’t possible for the unmarked buttons in Johnny Mnemonic, which either don’t have screens or don’t have buttons next to the screen.
…Are a platform for virtual buttons
Perhaps the buttons on the lectern are unmarked because they’re intended for use in cyberspace. If the computer system generating the virtual reality is aware of the lectern’s location in relation to the user, it could generate labels within the virtual reality that the user would perceive as exactly where the physical buttons are. The buttons would then provide actual tactile feedback for location and when pressed.
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.
This post is about the speculative suicide kit called Quietus that appears in Children of Men.
Suicide is not an easy topic and I will do my best to address it seriously. Let me first take a moment to direct anyone who is considering or dealing with suicide to please stop reading this and talk to someone about it. I am unqualified to address—and this blog is not the place to work through—such issues.
In fact because this is a serious life-and-death issue, I’m going against my usual scifiinterfaces tack of thinking through this as a real-world product. While I believe in our right to self-direct our deaths with dignity in the face of terminal illness or longterm suffering, I also believe that it should be handled by caring, informed, and professional people rather than a kit. So, instead, I’m only going to address the design in the context of the film. It would take much more research, time, and the input of many professionals to confidently design for such a product in the real world.
So, on to Quietus, as part of the movie.
The booklet
When Theo visits his friend Jasper’s home, we are introduced to the blue kit, open on the coffee table between them. Theo reads out of a booklet that comes with it, “Is there a chance it will not work for me? There have been no cases of anyone surviving who has taken the preparation.” Afterward their conversation quickly veers off in another direction.
Ads
In the subsequent scene, when Theo is woken up by an alarm on his television, an ad for Quietus is playing. In it we read the tagline, “You Decide When,” and read three benefits being sold by the ad.
Up to £2,000 to your next of kin.
Painless transition guaranteed.
Illegals welcome.
The visuals include a man determinately drinking some clear blue liquid in a glass with a Quietus logo, before standing up and walking across a beach toward the surf, only to fade away.
Later, when Theo runs after one of London’s double-decker busses, we see the video ad again on the side of the bus, repeating the tag line and the benefit, “Up to £2,000 to your next of kin.”
In use
In a deeply moving scene (among many in this film) Jasper eventually uses the kit to kill his longtime-unresponsive wife Janice, before the Fishes extremist group comes to their house to kill them.
Evaluation
Quietus is not central to the plot. There are other ways Jasper could have spared his wife a terrible death or mistreatment at the hands of the Fishes.
Rather, Quietus is a narrative, worldbuilding prop that helps us understand the world of the story. It helps us to understand that people are so desperate and depressed they are willing, at mass scale, to consider suicide. It helps us to understand that the government is facing such a terrible lack of resources that it has to incentivize this suicide to keep its population to some manageable level, to those who can still press on. It helps to underscore how important the sound of children’s voices are to most of the world’s sense of hope and purpose.
Given that narrative purpose, the design of the kit is sublime.
The name frames the kit as a positive, peaceful thing. It’s an existing word that means “final thing.” Even the “–us” suffix helps tell the story by appealing to a collective sense. It’s to “quiet us.” The word sounds Latinate and thereby educated, medical, trustworthy. It focuses on a result, i.e. quiet, and distracts from its morbidness.
The logotype looks like it is set in a modified Times New Roman or Garamond (can anyone identify it?), and the letter spacing is wide; signaling familiarity, trust and serenity.
The kit comes with a glass with the logo to give a sense of ritual and importance, reinforce the brand promise, and help the participants get the measurements right.
The repeated use of sky-blue color and white beams in the ad, the box, and the liquid speak to freedom, spirituality, and something greater than ourselves.
The professional design of the kit (its advertisement, the printed graphics on the box) and its high production quality (a glass, a little bottle for the drug, the glossy cardboard of the 4-color printed box, the vacuum-formed plastic that holds these and the booklet) helps us understand the scope of the initiative. This is not something a ragtag group has cobbled together, but an expensive, professional offering.
The reimbursement helps us infer that the reasons the government is offering it are financial.
Welcoming “illegals” reinforces that politically, this world is defined by the refugee crisis, which points to the larger infertility world crisis that gave it rise.
I can imagine two improvements that might increase believability for the story.
The logotype on the glass should be the same one as everywhere else. (We see a closeup of the different logo in the TV ad, see above.) I suspect this is a production error, but the angles of the Futura-like typeface seem cold and precise, off-brand from what we see elsewhere. It doesn’t add anything to have them mismatched, and detracts a bit from the professional, trustworthy veneer.
The organization promises a financial incentive to participants’ next of kin. This adds a believability complication. How would the organization confirm deaths while protecting against fraud?
1. Someone contacts Quietus and says, “I’m about to kill myself with Quietus. Send the money to mycousin John at the following account.” (1a. Doesn’t actually kill themselves. 1b. May actually be the John in question.)
2. Someone contacts Quietus and says, “I’ve just found the body of my cousin John, and a note reading I am to receive money from Quietus.” (2a. John may not be dead. 2b. John may not even be aware of this scam. 2c. Or the cousin may have killed John.)
Presuming that the government still seeks to process cadavers rather than let them decay at the place of death, the local coroner would still be involved in processing the body, and could be used as the source of confirmation of actual death, identity of the body, and relationship to the recipient. To embody this, there would need to be some easy way (and incentive) for the coroner to report the death back to Quietus. This points at a missing artifact in the movie.
I’d recommend a bracelet or necklace in the kit with a blue Quietus background, the logo, and a QR code or large ID number, meant to be worn by the participant prior to taking the drink and later noticed and used by the coroner. Medicalert would be a good, recognizable model for production. In the scene, Jasper would glance at it briefly and discard it, but it would be a nice rounding out of the logic of the service.
OMG y’all. We totally got asked on a date and we should totally go.
So I happen to be in NYC for the Interaction17 conference this week, and agreed with the guys from the Decipher SciFi podcast that we should hang out. So it’s late notice, but we have a plan: Join us at 7:25 P.M. to watch The Space Between Us, and then hangout and chat about it afterward? There may even be podcast recording and interface redesigning, it’s hard to say. Providing you’re not into The Big Game.
