This appears in the background of the dinner scene, but I cannot tell what it does. Anyone?
Tag Archives: activation
6-Screen TV
When Marty Jr. gets home, he approaches the large video display in the living room, which is displaying a cropped image of “The Gold of Their Bodies (Et l’or de Leur Corps)” by Paul Gauguin. He speaks to the screen, saying Art off. After a bit of static, the screen goes black. He then says, OK, I want channels 18, 24, 63, 109, 87, and the Weather Channel. As he says each, a sixth of the screen displays the live feed. The number for the channel appears in the upper left corner for a short while before fading. Marty Jr. then sits down to watch the six channels simultaneously.
Voice control. Perfect recognition. No modality. Spot on. It might dynamically update the screen in case he only wanted to watch 2 or 3 channels, but perhaps it is a cheaper system apropos to the McFly household.
Scenery display
Jennifer is amazed to find a window-sized video display in the future McFly house. When Lorraine arrives at the home, she picks up a remote to change the display. We don’t see it up close, but it looks like she presses a single button to change the scene from a sculpted garden to one of a beach sunset, a city scape, and a windswept mountaintop. It’s a simple interface, though perhaps more work than necessary.
We don’t know how many scenes are available, but having to click one button to cycle through all of them could get very frustrating if there’s more than say, three. Adding a selection ring around the button would allow the display to go from a selected scene to a menu from which the next one might be selected from amongst options.
Wearable soundboard
One of Griff Tannan’s gang, named Data, wears a sound board on his vest. When Tannan gets a rise out of Marty by asking if he’s chicken, the gang member underscores the accusation by removing a protective plate over some buttons on his vest and holds one down to play a looping sound clip of a clucking chicken.
That’s pretty awesome, actually. Having all the sounds available at the touch of a button adds a layer of remix culture expressiveness with maximum speed. No modes, no menus, just remembering which sound goes with which button, and his spatial memory is perfect for that. If the buttons were labeled with the sound, or shaped informatively, it might reduce the burden on memory.
You might also reduce the time it takes to respond by removing the protective plate, but Griff is enough of a loose cannon that he might go violent if an accidental sound effect insulted him. So that extra step is probably the safest.
But if we were to really make this it’s most awesome, you’d make it agentive, such that the plate constantly listened to the conversation for keywords or keyphrases and responded with appropriate snarky sound effects. (Smartphone startup founded around this idea in 3…2…1…)
Thumbknob
To get Jennifer into her home, the police take her to the front door of her home. They place her thumb on a small circular reader by the door. Radial LEDs circle underneath her thumb for a moment as it reads. Then a red light above the reader turns off and a green light turns on. The door unlocks and a synthesized voice says, Welcome home, Jennifer!
Similarly to the Thumbdentity, a multifactor authentication would be much more secure. The McFly family is struggling, so you might expect them to have substandard technology, but that the police are using something similar casts that in doubt.
The Jacket
Dr. Brown gives Marty some 21st century clothes in order to blend in. The first is the pair of Nike MAGs. The other item of clothing Marty must don is a jacket. It has two functions. When Marty first tries it on, the sleeves are nearly twice as long as they ought to be. After complaining that it doesnt fit, Dr. Brown reaches and pinches a blinking and beeping red LED at the base of the jacket’s zipper. In response, the sleeves retract to a proper length, the pocket flaps shrink, and the epaulettes flatten out as a synthesized voice states, “Adjusting fit.”
You might wonder why, if the jacket is designed to be properly fitted, the sleeves start at a length that would not fit any human. My answer is fashion. Later, when we see Marty Jr. in the 80s shop, one sleeve is left super long. It could be that his is busted or just that he’s disheveled, but youth fashion has often adopted Handicap Principle as markers of status and aloofness. c.f. hip hop baggy pants. No one else shows this same thing, but fashion seems very individualized in 2015 (1985).
Later after Marty gets soaked in the town square reflecting pool, the red LED on the zipper begins beeping and blinking again. Marty reaches down and pinches it, and a voice announces, “Drying clothes: on,” as hidden air dryers puff the jacket around him drying his hair and the jacket. When it’s done it emits a slim beep it announces happily, “Your jacket is now dry!”
Sure, that’s pretty cool, and obviously played for the How-Wacky-Is-This joke. But the one-button interface speaks to a great deal of context awareness and capabilities for a wearable.
Nike MAGs
Dr. Brown gives Marty some 21st century clothes in order to blend in. The first of these items are shoes. Marty is surprised to see no laces. To activate them, he pushes his foot into the shoe. When his heel makes contact, the main strap constricts to hold his heel in place. Then the laces constrict to hold the ball of the heel down. Finally, the tongue of the shoe and the Nike logo glow.
Yep. Perfect. The activation is natural to the act of putting on the device. The glow acts as a status indicator and symbol. No wonder everyone wanted them.
Time circuits (which interface the Flux Capacitor)
Time traveling in the DeLorean is accomplished in three steps. In the first, he traveler turns on the “time circuits” using a rocking switch in the central console. Its use is detailed in the original Back to the Future, as below.
In the second, the traveler sets the target month, day, year, hour, and minute using a telephone keypad mounted vertically on the dashboard to the left, and pressing a button below stoplight-colored LEDs on the left, and then with an extra white status indicator below that before some kind of commit button at the bottom.
In the third, you get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour and flood the flux capacitor with 1.21 gigawatts of power.
Seems simple.
It’s not…
Rocker switch?
Note that the rocker switch angles down to a nearly 45 degree angle in the on position. One of the worst thing that could happen is for that thing to get accidentally turned off at the wrong time, I imagine. (Back to the Future 4: Lost in Somewhen?) The 45 degree angle makes an accidental activation unlikely, but the T-shaped handle means it could catch on a sleeve or bag handle or something. There are more secure safety switches, but I also wonder if it would be smarter to use the Fake Off mode that most electronics run in today, where they’re never really off, but look off, just waiting for user interaction to spring to life. With a Mr. Fusion on board, I presume powering it isn’t that much of a problem.
Good disambiguation
Note that the pad only has numbers. But Doc uses the military and European standard date format
[day of month] [month] [year]
which might confuse another user, i.e. Marty, entering the stupid USA standard
[month] [day of month] [year]
Though preventing errors is preferable, at least Doc helps Marty recognize errors by displaying the month in 3-character text format, which would help Marty realize if he’d accidentally put in 10 September instead of 09 October.
Bad disambiguation
Note that doc is traveling to 4:29 in the afternoon, and the display has a tiny LED A.M./P.M. indicator. Better is the less ambiguous military time. Sure, audiences might have been confused, but using a 24-hour clock would have been less ambiguous for diegetic users, you could eliminate the AM/PM indicator, and Doc could use the existing number pad for entry without having to either add an “AM” and “PM” button (missing from the console), or doing some annoying “press 1 for AM or 2 for PM now” IVR thing.
While we’re on time disambiguation, what, uh, time zone is this? Did doc only ever plan to fly in and around Hill Valley? It might have been keyed to the Prime Meridian, or to Pacific Time, but if so it would have been very useful to have it marked as such. If not, it should display the current time zone and provide a means to change it. Somehow. With that number pad. (Or more controls.)
Bad input constraint and recovery
It’s wholly possible to enter a day-of-month or month of “99,” which is nonsensical given the Gregorian calendar that we use today. How does the system handle this? A mod function? There’s no clue, but the unconstrained inputs would allow it.
Farther travel?
As the Long Now Foundation reminds us, a four-digit date is really short-sighted. So Doc didn’t want to travel to 10,000 C.E. and see if Zager & Evans were right? And what if he wanted to go meet Amenhotep? How does he specify 1526 B.C.E.? It seems unduly constrained.
Misleading mapping
I don’t know what those LEDs to the left of the input panel do, but I can tell they’re poorly mapped. The colors go, from top to bottom: red, yellow, and green, like a stoplight. Then there’s the extra white LED below that maps to nothing. But the LED colors on the display go from top to bottom red for destination, green for present, yellow for last time departed. Better mapping would have these two agree, or distinct color schemes.
Missing controls
In 1985 dialing a telephone number worked much like the dial-a-date seen here. Punch a sequence of numbers and the system runs with the input. But instant-input systems need a way to correct errors; either the ability to review and correct the input, or to abort the input altogether and start over.
Phone users from back then will recall it was entirely possible to mistype a digit and dial a wrong number. You’d be connected to a stranger who had no idea who this “Marty” you wanted was. This is more serious in the DeLorean than on a phone, as it drops the user into circumstances potentially much more dire, from which there might be no recovery. What would happen if they had accidentally wound up in 21 October 1015? Wholly different story. Is Biff distantly related to Cnut the Great?
Doc might be able to review the input on the display before getting up to speed, but there’s no obvious control for aborting input so far and starting over. (What if he has skipped a digit instead of mistyping one?) A simple delete button would help him correct mistyped digits. Even if he mistyped the first one and only realized it at the end, it wouldn’t be too burdensome to press delete the handful of times.
Rich preview
How does the system confirm for Doc that he’s entered the right date he intended to? On one level, sure, the 7-segment LED output is clear and unambiguous. It’s a nice discrete number. But of course 7-segment 1989 isn’t that easy to distinguish from 1898 when you’re distracted. Better would be to give a preview of the meaning of the choices entered (but not yet enacted) by the user. If there was a video screen in the car, then maybe it could show scenes from old Westerns with the label “Headed to 1898: The Old West.” You could even do it with the cars’ speakers and an audio soundscape if a screen wouldn’t work for space or distraction reasons.
Security
As noted in the overview, Biff(2015) gets into the car to make off for 1955 early in the film. I can’t quite figure out how he was able to figure out turning on the time circuit and that the 88MPH was a target speed, but he did. (Seriously, looking for fan theories here.) Of course Doc might have designed everything to be perfectly understandable for Marty, but that’s no excuse to avoid authenticating the user, since Doc is so panicked about the consequences of the time travel that he’s doing all the times. [sic]
Night Vision Goggles
Genarro: “Are they heavy?”
Excited Kid: “Yeah!”
Genarro: “Then they’re expensive, put them back”
Excited Kid: [nope]
The Night Vision Goggles are large binoculars that are sized to fit on an adult head. They are stored in a padded case in the Tour Jeep’s trunk. When activated, a single red light illuminated in the “forehead” of the device, and four green lights appear on the rim of each lens. The green lights rotate around the lens as the user zooms the binoculars in and out. On a styling point, the goggles are painted in a very traditional and very adorable green and yellow striped dinosaur pattern.
Tim holds the goggles up as he plays with them, and it looks like they are too large for his head (although we don’t see him adjust the head support at all, so he might not have known they were adjustable). He adjusts the zoom using two hidden controls—one on each side. It isn’t obvious how these work. It could be that…
- There are no controls, and it automatically focuses on the thing in the center of the view or on the thing moving.
- One side zooms in, and the other zooms out.
- Both controls have a zoom in/zoom out ability.
- Each side control powers its own lens.
- Admittedly, the last option is the least likely.
Unfortunately the movie just doesn’t give us enough information, leaving it as an exercise for us to consider.
Dr. Grant, Timmy is hogging the tech
Note that there aren’t enough goggles in the Jeep for everyone. During a tour this might set up a competition for the goggles. Considering how much a ticket to the island is implied to cost, the passengers in the Jeep would likely be unhappy at this constraint.
Better here would be some kind of HUD for the entire Jeep, with a thermal overlay or night-vision projection of what’s around the Jeep.
Alternatively, if cost is indeed an issue to Hammond, the TV screen could be used to show camera feeds of the pen and dinosaurs inside.
Hopefully A Prototype
The lights on the front show what’s happening internally, and give feedback that the goggles are doing something to people watching. As we learn soon after this scene, dinosaurs are also very sensitive to light and motion. Especially the T-Rex.
These night vision goggles would work best in darkness, where it would add to the tour to see a dinosaur behaving (relatively) naturally. If the dinosaurs on the tour are very sensitive to light, then the motion on the front of the goggles would actually be counter to the goals person using the goggles.
So let’s presume these were a prototype, and why they were in the trunk and not mentioned by Hammond at the start of the tour.
Overall
The goggles look easy to use, but appear to need refinement from field experience. A key point will be how the passengers react to having enough of them, and whether they serve the tourists in experiencing the park as intended.
Ghost trap
Once ghosts are bound by the streams from the Proton Packs, they can be trapped by a special trap. It has two parts: The trap itself, that is roughly the size of a toaster, and the foot pedal activation switch, which connects to the trap box by a long black cord.
To open the trap, a ghostbuster simply steps on the foot pedal. For a second the trap sparks with some unknown energy and opens to reveal a supernatural light within. Once open, the bound ghost can be manipulated down towards the trap.
When the ghost is close to the trap, the Ghostbuster steps on the foot pedal again. Lots of special effects later, the ghost gets sucked down into the trap and it closes.
With a ghost contained inside, a red indicator light illuminates near the handle to let users know that a dangerous thing is contained within. (Also, it emits smoke, but I suspect that’s a side effect rather than a feature that’s been added in.) The trap can be held by the long handle or (and this is the way the Ghostbusters themselves tend to carry it around) by the cord.
The design of the trap has so many great aspects. The separate control keeps the ghostbuster a safe distance from both the proton streams, the trap, and the ghost. And the use of a foot pedal as a switch keeps his hands free to keep a defensive grip the proton gun. I should also make note of the industrial design of the thing: The safety stripes, the handle, and the shape tell of a device handmade by scientists that is dangerous and powerful.
Still, some improvements
If the activation was wireless rather than a foot pedal, the Ghostbuster would be free to move to wherever was most tactically sound, rather than constrained to standing near it. Wireless controls have their own tradeoffs, of course, and those may not be acceptable in the mission-critical scenarios of ghostbusting. If that control was also hands-free (gestural, vocal, ocular, brain) then you’d keep the goodness of the hands-free pedal.
The red light is a little ambiguous. It could just mean “power on,” which doesn’t help. Blinking should be used very judiciously, but here it’s warranted, so I’d make that blink to say “Dangerous thing contained. Release only with caution.” Let’s presume the thing automatically locks when a ghost is trapped and can only be unlocked by the containment unit (the next post). Even better might be several lights blinking, perhaps both around the trap doors and around any controls that might release the ghost, e.g. the foot pedal. You could even make it blink similarly to the “working” light animation of the Proton Packs to tie the equipment together.
One problem that’s familiar to software designers is that’s that the control is a stateless toggle, i.e. it looks and behaves the same whether you’re opening the trap or closing the trap. If the trap doesn’t automatically lock with a ghost in it, that’s a major problem. Imagine if the activator had hid behind a curtain to trap a poltergeist and wasn’t sure if he’d accidentally stepped on it. A UX 101 rule of thumb is that controls should indicate the state of the thing they’re controlling. So the pedal should have a signal to indicate whether the trap is open or closed, even though the trap itself conveys that pretty well. Even better if that signal is something that can be felt with the foot. Maybe it’s a rocker switch? (Like this Linemaster, but more exaggerated.)
Lastly, we can also presume that the trap has a power source, and that there’s a time pressure to get the trap to the containment unit before that power source dies. But where’s that information? So some indication somewhere of how much power and time is left for that would be very useful to avoid all that work (and, you know, property damage) going to waste.
Small improvements, but each would improve it and not take away from the narrative.