After Jasper tells a white lie to Theo, Miriam, and Kee to get them to escape the advancing gang of Fishes, he returns indoors. To set a mood, he picks up a remote control and presses a button on it while pointing it at a display.
He watches a small transparent square that rests atop some things in a nook. (It’s that decimeter-square, purplish thing on the left of the image, just under the lampshade.) The display initially shows an album queue, with thumbnails of the album covers and two bright words, unreadably small. In response to his button press, the thumbnail for Franco Battiato’s album FLEURs slides from the right to the left. A full song list for the album appears beneath the thumbnail. Then track two, the cover of Ruby Tuesday, begins to play. A small thumbnail to the right of the album cover appears, featuring some white text on a dark background and a cycling, animated border. Theo puts the remote control down, picks up the Quietus box, and walks over to Janice. *sniff*
This small bit of speculative consumer electronics gets around 17 seconds of screen time, but we see enough to consider the design.
Persistent display
One very nice thing about it is that it is persistently visible. As Marshall McLuhan famously noted, we are simply not equipped with earlids. This means that when music is playing in a space, you can’t really just turn away from it to stop listening. You’ll still hear it. In UX parlance, sound is non-modal.
Yet with digital music players, the visual displays that tell you about what’s being played, or the related interfaces that help you know what you can do with the music are often hidden behind modes. Want to know what that song you can’t stop hearing is? Find your device, wake it up, enter a password, find the app, and even then you may have to root around to find the software to find what you’re looking for.
But a persistent object means that non-modal sound is accompanied by (mostly) non-modal visuals. This little box is always somewhere, glowing, and telling you what’s playing, what just played, and what’s next.
Remote control
Finding the remote is a different problem, of course, and if your household is like my household, it is a thing which seems to want to be lost. To keep that non-modality of sound matched by the controls, it would be better to have the device or the environment know when Jasper is looking at the display, and enable loose gestural or voice controls to control it.
Imagine the scene if he grabs the Quietus box, looks up to the display, and says, “Play…” then pause while he considers his options, and says “…‘Ruby Tuesday’…the Battiato one.” We would have known that his selection has deep personal meaning. If Cuarón wanted to convey that this moment has been planned for a while, Jasper could even have said, “Play her goodbye song.”
Visual layout
The visual design of the display is, like most of the technology, meant to be a peripheral thing, accepting attention but not asking for it. In this sense it works. The text is so small the audience is not tempted to read it. The thumbnails are so small it is only if you already knew the music that it would refresh your memory. But if this was a real product meant to live in the home, I would redesign the display to be usable at the 3–6 meter distance, which would require vastly reducing the number of elements, increasing their size, and perhaps overlaying text on image.
When Theo, Kee, and Miriam flee the murderous Fishes, they take refuge in Jasper’s home for the night. They are awoken in the morning by Jasper’s sentry system.
A loud cacophonous alarm sounds, made up of what sounds like recorded dog barks, bells clanging, and someone banging a stick on a metal trash can lid. Jasper explains to everyone in the house that “It’s the alarm! Someone’s breaking in!”
They gather around a computer screen with large speakers on either side. The screen shows four video feeds labeled ROAD A, FOREST A, FRONT DOOR, and ROAD B. Labels reading MOTION DETECTED <> blink at the bottom of the ROAD A and ROAD B feeds, where we can see members of the Fishes removing the brush that hides the driveway to Jasper’s house.
The date overlays the upper right hand corner of the screen, 06-DEC-2027, 08:10:58.
Across the bottom is a control panel of white numbers and icons on red backgrounds.
A radio button control for the number of video feeds to be displayed. Though we are seeing the 4-up display, the icon does not appear to be different than the rest.
16 enumerated icons, the purpose for which is unclear.
Video control icons for reverse, stop, play, and fast forward.
Three buttons with gray backgrounds and icons.
A wide button blinking MASTER ALARM
The scene cuts to Jasper’s rushing to the car outside the home, where none of the cacophony can be heard.
Similar to his car dashoard, it makes sense that Jasper has made this alarm himself. This might explain the clunky layout and somewhat inscrutable icons. (What do the numbers do? What about that flower on the gray background?)
The three jobs of an intruder alarm
Jasper’s alarm is OK. It certainly does the job of grabbing the household’s attention, which is the first job of an alarm, and does it without alerting the intruders, as we see in the shot outside the house.
It could do a bit better at the second job of an alarm, which is to inform the household of the nature of the problem. That they have to gather around the monitor takes precious time that could be used for making themselves safer. It could be improved by removing this requirement.
If Jasper had added more information to the audio alarm, even so basic as a prerecorded “Motion on the road! Motion on the road!” then they might not have needed to gather around the monitor at all.
If the relevant video feeds could be piped to wearable devices, phones, or their car, then they can fill in their understanding at the same time that they are taking steps to getting the hell out of there.
Having the artificial intelligence that we have in actual-world 2017 (much less speculative 2027), we know that narrow AI can process that video to have many more details in the broadcast message. “Motion on the road! I see three cars and at least a dozen armed men!”
There is arguably a third job of an advanced alarm, and this is to help the household understand the best course of action. This can be problematic when the confidence of the recommendation is low. But if the AI can confidently make a recommendation, it can use whatever actuators it has to help them along their way.
It could be informational, such as describing the best option. The audio alarm could encourage them to “Take the back road!” It could even alert the police (though in the world of Children of Men, Jasper would not trust them and they may be disinclined to care.)
The alarm could give some parameters and best-practice recommendations like, “You have 10 minutes to be in the car! Save only yourselves, carry nothing!”
It could keep updating the situation and the countdown so the household does not have to monitor it.
It can physically help as best it can, like remotely starting and positioning cars for them.
This can get conceptually tricky as the best course of action may be conditional, e.g. “If you can get to the car in 5 minutes, then escape is your best option, but if it takes longer or you have defenses, then securing the home and alerting the police is the better bet.” But that may be too much to process in the moment, and for a household that does not rehearse response scenarios, the simpler instruction may be safer.
When Luke is driving Kee and Theo to a boat on the coast, the car’s heads-up-display shows him the car’s speed with a translucent red number and speed gauge. There are also two broken, blurry gauges showing unknown information.
Suddenly the road becomes blocked by a flaming car rolled onto the road by a then unknown gang. In response, an IMPACT warning triangle zooms in several times to warn the driver of the danger, accompanied by a persistent dinging sound.
It commands attention effectively
Props to this attention-commanding signal. Neuroscience tells us that symmetrical expansion like this triggers something called a startle response. (I first learned this in the awesome and highly recommended book Mind Hacks.) Any time we see symmetrical expansion in our field of vision, within milliseconds our sympathetic nervous system takes over, fixes our attention to that spot, and prompts us to avoid the thing that our brains believe is coming right at us. It all happens way before conscious processing, and that’s a good thing. It’s evolutionarily designed to keep us safe from falling rocks, flying fists, and pouncing tigers, and scenarios like that don’t have time for the relatively slow conscious processes.
Well visualized
The startle response varies in strength depending on several things.
The anxiety of the person (an anxious person will react to a slighter signal)
We want the signal to be strong enough to grab the attention of a possibly-distracted driver, but not strong enough to cause them to overreact and risk control of car. While anything this critical to safety needs to be thoroughly tested, the size of the IMPACT triangle seems to sit in the golden mean between these two.
And while the effect is strongest in the lab with a dark shape expanding over a light background, I suspect given habituation to the moving background of the roadscape and a comparatively static HUD, the sympathetic nervous system would have no problem processing this light-on-dark shape.
Well placed
We only see it in action once, so we don’t know if the placement is dynamic. But it appears to be positioned on the HUD such that it draws Luke’s attention directly to the point in his field of vision where the flaming car is. (It looks offset to us because the camera is positioned in the middle of the back seat rather than the driver’s seat.) This dynamic positioning is great since it saves the driver critical bits of time. If the signal was fixed, then the driver would have his attention pulled between the IMPACT triangle and the actual thing. Much better to have the display say, “LOOK HERE!”
Readers of the book will recall this nuance from the lesson from Chapter 8, Augment the Periphery of Vision: “Objects should be placed at the edge of the user’s view when they are not needed, and adjacent to the locus of attention when they are.”
Improvements
There are a few improvements that could be made.
It could synchronize the audio to the visual. The dinging is dissociated from the motion of the triangle, and even sounds a bit like a seat belt warning rather than something trying to warn you of a possible, life-threatening collision. Having the sound and visual in sync would strengthen the signal. It could even increase volume with the probability and severity of impact.
It could increase the strength of the audio signal by suppressing competing audio, by pausing any audio entertainment and even canceling ambient sounds.
It could predict farther into the future. The triangle only appears once the flaming car actually stops in the road a few meters ahead. But there is clearly a burning car rolling down to the road for seconds before that. We see it. The passengers see it. Better sensors and prediction models would have drawn Luke’s attention to the problem earlier and helped him react sooner.
It could also know when the driver is actually focused on the problem and than fade the signal to the periphery so that it does not cover up any vital visual information. It can then fade completely when the risk has passed.
An even smarter system might be able to adjust the strength of the signal based on real-time variables, like the anxiety of the driver, his or her current level of distraction, ambient noise and light, and of course the degree of risk (a tumbleweed vs. a small child on the road).
It could of course go full agentive and apply the brakes or swerve if the driver fails to take appropriate action in time.
Despite these improvements, I believe Luke’s HUD to be well designed that gets underplayed in the drama and disorientation of the scene.
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.
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.
Once Johnny has installed his motion detector on the door, the brain upload can begin.
3. Building it
Johnny starts by opening his briefcase and removing various components, which he connects together into the complete upload system. Some of the parts are disguised, and the whole sequence is similar to an assassin in a thriller film assembling a gun out of harmless looking pieces.
It looks strange today to see a computer system with so many external devices connected by cables. We’ve become accustomed to one piece computing devices with integrated functionality, and keyboards, mice, cameras, printers, and headphones that connect wirelessly.
Cables and other connections are not always considered as interfaces, but “all parts of a thing which enable its use” is the definition according to Chris. In the early to mid 1990s most computer user were well aware of the potential for confusion and frustration in such interfaces. A personal computer could have connections to monitor, keyboard, mouse, modem, CD drive, and joystick – and every single device would use a different type of cable. USB, while not perfect, is one of the greatest ever improvements in user interfaces.
Why not go wireless? Wireless devices remove the need for a physical connection, but this means that anyone, not just you, could potentially connect. So instead of worrying about whether we have the right kind of cable, we now worry about the right kind of Bluetooth pairing and WiFi encryption password scheme. Mobile wireless devices also need their own batteries, which have to be charged. So wireless may seem visually cleaner, but comes with its own set of problems.
As of early 2016 we have two new standards, Lightning and USB-C, that are orientation-independent (only fifty years after audio cables), high bandwidth, and able to transmit power to peripherals as well. Perhaps by 2021 cables will have made a comeback as the usual way to connect devices.
2. Explaining it
Johnny explains the process to the scientists. He needs them to begin the upload by pushing a button, helpfully labelled “start”, on the gadget that resembles an optical disk drive. There’s a big red button as well, which is not explained but would make an excellent “cancel” button.
It would be simpler if Johnny just did this himself. But we will shortly discover that the upload process is apparently very painful. If Johnny had his hands near the system, he might involuntarily push another button or disturb a cable. So for them, having a single, easily differentiated button to press minimizes their chance of messing it up.
1. Making codes
He also sticks a small black disk on the hotel room’s silver remote control. The small disk is evidently is a wireless controller or camera of some kind. The scientists must watch the upload progress counter, and as it approaches the end, use this modified remote to grab three frames from the TV display, which will become the “access code” for the data. (More on this below.)
None of the buttons on this remote have markings or labels, but neither Johnny nor the scientist who will be using it are bothered. Perhaps this hotel chain tries to please every possible guest by not favouring any particular language? But even in that case, I’d expect there to be some kind of symbols on the buttons and a multilingual manual to explain the meaning of each. Maybe Johnny spends so much time in hotel suites that he has memorised the button layout?
Short of a mind reading remote that can translate any button press into “what the user intended”, I have to admit this is a terrible interface.
(There is a label on the black disk, but I have no idea what it means or even which script that is. Anyone?)
0. Go go go
Johnny plugs in his implant, puts on a headset with more cables, and bites down on a mouthguard. He’s ready.
The scientist pushes the start button and the upload begins. Johnny sees the data stream in his headset as a flood of graphics and text.
Why does he need the headset when there is a direct cable connection to the implant? The movie doesn’t make it explicit. It could be related to the images used as the access code. (More on this below.) Perhaps the images need to be processed by the recipient’s own optic nerve system for more reliable storage?
Still, in the spirit of apologetics we should try to find a better explanation than “an opportunity for 1995 cutting edge computer generated graphics.” Perhaps it is a very flashy progress indicator? Older computer systems had blinking lights on disk drives to indicate activity, copied on some of today’s USB sticks. Current-day file upload or download GUIs have progress bars. As processing and graphics capabilities increase, it will be possible for software to display thumbnails or previews of the actual data being transferred without slowing down.
Unfortunately there is an argument against this, which is that the obvious upload progress indicator is a numeric display counting gigabytes down to zero, and it makes a fast chirping sound as a sonic indicator as well. The counter shows the data flowing at gigabytes per second, the entire upload lasting about a minute. There’s also the problem that it’s not Johnny who is interested in knowing whether the upload is scientific data rather than, say, a video collection; but the scientists, and they can’t see it.
As the counter drops below one hundred, the scientist points the remote with black disk at the TV display, currently showing a cartoon, and presses the middle button. The image from the TV appears overlaid on the data stream to Johnny. This is a little odd, because Johnny assured the scientists that he wouldn’t know what the access codes were himself. Maybe these brief flashes are not enough time for him to remember these particular images among the gigabytes of visual content. But the way they’re shown to us, I’ll bet you can remember them when they come up again later in the plot.
Two more images are grabbed before the counter stops. When the upload finishes, the three images are printed out. (In the original film this is shown upside down, so I have rotated the image.)
Tagged:
So what are the images for? The script isn’t clear. I suggest that the images are being used as the equivalents of very large random numbers for whatever cryptography scheme protects the data against unauthorised access. Some current day systems use the timing of key presses and mouse movements as a source of randomness because humans simply can’t move their fingers with microsecond precision. Here, the human element makes it impossible to predict exactly which frame is chosen.
Humans also find images much easier to recognise than hundred digit numbers. Anyone who has seen the printout will be able to say whether a particular image is part of the access code or not with a high degree of confidence. In computer systems today, Secure Shell, or ssh, is a widely used encrypted terminal program for secure access to servers. Recent versions of ssh have a ‘randomart’ capability which shows a small ASCII icon generated from the current cryptographic key to everyone who logs on. If this ASCII icon appears different, this alerts everyone that the server key has been changed.
There’s one potential usability problem with the whole “pick three random images” mechanism. The last frame was grabbed when the counter was very close to zero. What would have happened if he had been too slow and missed altogether? Wouldn’t it be more reliable to have the upload system automatically grab the images rather than rely on a human? Chris suggests that maybe it secretly did grab three images that could have used without human input, but privileged the human input since it was more reliably random.
Quick aside: You may be asking, if images would be so wonderful, why aren’t we using them in this way already? It’s because our current security systems need not just very large random numbers, but very large random numbers with particular mathematical properties such as being prime. But let’s cut Johnny Mnemonic some slack, saying that by 2021 we may have new algorithms.
OK, back to the plot.
-1. Sharing the codes
The access codes are to be faxed from Beijing to Newark, although this gets interrupted by the Yakuza intruders. This is yet another device with unmarked buttons.
This device makes the same beeps and screeches as a 1990s analog fax machine. Since we’ll later learn that all the fax messages and phone calls are stored digitally in cyberspace, this must be a skeuomorphism, the old familiar audio tones now serving just as progress indicators.
As with other audio output, the tones allow the user to know that the transmission is proceeding and when it ends without having to pay full attention to the device. On the other hand, there is potential for confusion here as the digital upload is (presumably) much faster. Most current day computer systems could upload three photos, even in high resolution, well before the sequence of tones would complete. Users would most likely wait longer than actually necessary before moving on to their next task.
-2. Washing up
During the upload Johnny clenches his fists and bites his mouthguard. When the upload finishes, he retreats to the bathroom in considerable pain. At one point blood flows from his nose, and he swipes his hand over the tap to wash it down the drain. The bathroom announces that the water temperature is 17 degrees. We’ll come back to this later.
As Make It So emphasises in the chapter on brain interfaces, there is nothing in our current knowledge to suggest that writing or reading memories to or from a human brain would be painful. On the other hand, we know that information in the brain isthe shape of the neurons in the brain. Who knows what side effects will happen as those neurons are disconnected and reconnected as they need to be? We don’t know, so can’t really say whether it would hurt or not.
-3. Escaping the Yakuza
As mentioned in a prior post, while he is in the bathroom, the motion detector Johnny installed on the hotel door isn’t very effective and the Yakuza break in, kill everyone else, and acquire the second of the three access code images. Johnny escapes with the first image and flies to Newark, North America.
The phone system aboard the Galactica is a hardwired system that can be used in two modes: Point-to-point, and one-to-many. The phones have an integrated handset wired to a control box and speaker. The buttons on the control box are physical keys, and there are no automatic voice controls.
In Point-to-point mode, the phones act as a typical communication system, where one station can call a single other station. In the one-to-many mode the phones are used as a public address system, where a single station can broadcast to the entire ship.
The phones are also shown acting as broadcast speakers. These speakers are able to take in many different formats of audio, and are shown broadcasting various different feeds:
Ship-wide Alerts (“Action Stations!”)
Local alarms (Damage control/Fire inside a specific bulkhead)
Radio Streams (pilot audio inside the launch prep area)
Addresses (calling a person to the closest available phone)
Each station is independent and generic. Most phones are located in public spaces or large rooms, with only a few in private areas. These private phones serve the senior staff in their private quarters, or at their stations on the bridge.
In each case, the phone stations are used as kiosks, where any crewmember can use any phone. It is implied that there is a communications officer acting as a central operator for when a crewmember doesn’t know the appropriate phone number, or doesn’t know the current location of the person they want to reach.
Utterly Basic
There is not a single advanced piece of technology inside the phone system. The phones act as a dirt-simple way to communicate with a place, not a person (the person just happens to be there while you’re talking).
The largest disadvantage of this system is that it provides no assistance for its users: busy crewmembers of an active warship. These crew can be expected to need to communicate in the heat of battle, and quickly relay orders or information to a necessary party.
This is easy for the lower levels of crewmembers: information will always flow up to the bridge or a secondary command center. For the officers, this task becomes more difficult.
First, there are several crewmember classes that could be anywhere on the ship:
Security
Damage Control
Couriers
Other officers
Without broadcasting to the entire ship, it could be extremely difficult to locate these specific crewmembers in the middle of a battle for information updates or new orders.
Unconventional Enemy
The primary purpose of the Galactica was to fight the Cylons: sentient robots capable of infiltrating networked computers. This meant that every system on the Galactica was made as basic as possible, without regard to its usability.
The Galactica’s antiquated phone system does prevent Cylon infiltration of a communications network aboard an active warship. Nothing the phone system does requires executing outside pieces of software.
A very basic upgrade to the phone system that could provide better usability would be a near-field tag system for each crew member. A passive near-field chip could be read by a non-networked phone terminal each time a crew member approached near the phone. The phone could then send a basic update to a central board at the Communications Center informing the operators of where each crewmember is. Such a system would not provide an attack surface (a weakness for them to infiltrate) for the enemy, and make finding officers and crew in an emergency situation both easier and faster: major advantages for a warship.
The near field sensors would add a second benefit, in that only registered crew could access specific terminals. As an example, the Captain and senior staff would be the only ones allowed to use the central phone system.
Brutally efficient hardware
The phone system succeeds in its hardware. Each terminal has an obvious speaker that makes a distinct sound each time the terminal is looking for a crewmember. When the handset is in use, it is easy to tell which side is up after a very short amount of training (the cable always comes out the bottom).
It is also obvious when the handset is active or inactive. When a crewmember pulls the handset out of its terminal, the hardware makes a distinctive audible and physical *click* as the switch opens a channel. The handset also slots firmly back into the terminal, making another *click* when the switch deactivates. This is very similar to a modern-day gas pump.
With a brief amount of training, it is almost impossible to mistake when the handset activates and deactivates.
Quick Wins
For a ship built in the heat of war at a rapid pace, the designers focused on what they could design quickly and efficiently. There is little in the way of creature comforts in the Phone interface.
Minor additions in technology or integrated functionality could have significantly improved the interface of the phone system, and may have been integrated into future ships of the Galactica’s line. Unfortunately, we never see if the military designers of the Galactica learned from their haste.
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.
Hidden behind a bookshelf console is the family’s other comm device. When they first use it in the show, Malla and Itchy have a quick discussion and approach the console and slide two panels aside.
The device is small and rectangular, like an oscilloscope, sitting on a shelf about eye level. It has a small, palm sized color cathode ray tube on the left. On the right is an LED display strip and an array of red buttons over an array of yellow buttons. Along the bottom are two dials.
Without any other interaction, the screen goes from static to a direct connection to a hangar where Luke Skywalker is working with R2-D2 to repair some mechanical part. He simply looks up to the camera, sees Malla and Itchy, and starts talking. He does nothing to accept the call or end it. Neither do they.
We also see the conversation from Luke’s perspective as well. It’s even more oscillioscopey, with lots of dials, switches, and sliders to either side.
So this all might be intriguing (and right in line with agentive design) but before we start to investigate, we need to look at another instance of its use. Just like the Imperial-issie Media Console, this functions differently later in the same show.
Talking to Leia
After Itchy’s SFW living room masturbation chair sequence, the camera cuts to Leia and C-3PO in an unspecified office somewhere. The droid works at a console for a moment and finally turns a dial. In the Wookie household, a loud dee-DEEP dee-DEEP sounds until Malla rushes to the console, and slides the panels aside. C-3PO sees Malla’s face, and turns to Leia saying, “Ah. I have made the connection. You may speak now if you wish.”
They do, and when the conversation is over, the feed just shuts off, with neither party doing anything to make it happen.
So. Yeaaaaah.
Activation
How is it turned on? One possibility is an architectural switch activated by sliding the panels. It would be a good design decision, as it is an action that needs to be undertaken anyway to use it. But that doesn’t explain Luke’s use.
Connection
How does Malla’s device know to call Luke once it’s on? It could be that it’s a fixed connection, like an intercom, that only calls that one other device. But it’s a Rebel garage. That doesn’t make sense. Why would Malla need to only call there? And of course they receive a call from Leia, who isn’t in that same garage, so it’s not exactly fixed.
Security
The device contains incriminating evidence, i.e. the direct connection to the Rebel base, and so it needs some sort of security. Why is that not in evidence?
Secret agent?
One technological concept that would answer a lot of these questions is that of agentive technology, i.e. artificial narrow intelligence that does things on behalf of its users.
It could explain how the device turns on and (some of) the security: the camera has hairy face recognition and persistently watches for authorized users, turning on when it sees one of them. Conceptually that would be far beyond common sci-fi tropes of the time, but in keeping with the New Criticism stance of the blog, should be considered.
It could explain how it knew to call Luke: It understands Shyriiwook and listened to the conversation that Itchy and Malla had before they opened the panel, knew they wanted to call Luke, and found him in the garage.
It could explain how it turns off: It’s smart enough to understand the linguistic, social, and physical cues that the conversation has ended.
The world of Star Wars even has this technology in evidence. The droids all exhibit artificial general intelligence, and it is only a failure of imagination that this intelligence should not be incorporated into important devices, or spaceships, or architecture.
This would also explain why c-3PO is managing the interface on his end but nobody else has to bother: An AI does not need another AI, just an API.
It would even explain why the damned thing rings. Take a moment to appreciate that. This is an illegal device on the Empire-controlled Kazook. We know this because it’s deliberately hidden, and our protagonists really work to avoid the Empire’s finding it. Yet when an unexpected call comes in, it shrilly announces the fact of itself to everyone within screeching range. The only way this is not the most moronic feature possible of an illegal object is if it can scan the surroundings and verify that it’s OK to ring. Because otherwise, it would be the most stupid feature of a stupidly stupid technology made in haste for a stupid show slopped together in haste and without any respect for a logical or consistent diegesis.
To distract Lumpy while she tends to dinner, Malla sits him down at a holotable to watch a circus program. She leans down to one of the four control panels inset around the table’s edge, presses a few buttons, and the program begins.
In the program small volumetric projections of human (not Wookie) performers appear on the surface of the table and begin a dance and acrobatic performance to a soundtrack that is, frankly, ear-curdling.
Partway through the performance, Lumpy presses the second-from-the-left button, and the main dancer (who has just got to be a Radical Faerie, a full year before that august organization formed) disappears from the table only to become a life-sized projection just off the table, as if the figure had invisible legs but stood on the floor of the house.
When Lumpy is done with the performance, he presses a button, and RF guy disappears from the room and reappears in small size on the table to join the other performers on the table for a bow and curtain call before they all disappear and that ghastly, inhumane music stops.
So…yeah. This interface.
The terrible usability of tape recorders
It’s pretty clear the control panels are cassette recorders. I know that young readers won’t know what the pfassk that is, so for due diligence, let me explain. Those devices recorded and played back audio stored on magnetic tapes wound in cartridges. The controls for it were six stay-state toggles. These types of buttons have two states. Pushing one locks it down and sets the device to a mode: Play, Rewind, or Fast Forward. One special button, Record (often colored red) had to be chorded with the Play button as a safety precaution against accidentally destroying an existing recording. Users had to press a special Stop button to release any pressed button and stop the mode. Fast forward and Rewind could be pressed while audio was playing, but in such cases they would act as a momentary button. When any of the modes reached the end of a tape, higher-end recorders would also automatically release that button.
So let’s all admit that these are pretty terrible controls. From the fact that they almost all look the same to the fact that toggles make much more sense. (Press one button to play, press that same button again to make it stop.) But toggles weren’t the consumer model of the time. And this holocircus interface, hastily put together from things that the prop department could purchase off the shelf in the one day they were given to hack it together, inherits all that unusability and piles some more confusion onto it.
For instance
When we see Lumpy press the “Make the Dancing Man Bigger” mode, no other buttons are depressed. That means Malla had to set the circus mode, start the program, and press something like a stop button that released those. In turn that means if there was nothing on the table, it could either be because this was a blank spot in the media or that it wasn’t actually playing. You couldn’t tell, though, because the neither the controls nor the media didn’t reflect the state of the thing. This is probably not a common problem because we see that the garish programs and their terrible soundtracks are pretty effing hard to miss, but from a pure usability point of view, it sucks and should be avoided.
Now, there’s probably a thought exercise that could be done to figure out what keys mapped to which functions (and how), as well as second-guess the capabilities of the media (could he have picked any performer to enlarge, or was there just this option?) but honestly, it would be a Sisyphean multithreaded process of single-function vs. combined-letter arguments made by myself in a wall of text with little to no payoff for either of us. Knock yourself out in the comments if you want, but I’d rather focus on another aspect of the interface that I think does pay off, and that’s the visual language of the VP.
You know, for kids
This volumetric projection does not have most of the visual signals common to sci-fi hologram trope:
Edge-lighting
Blue cast
Scan lines
Projection rays
It does have translucency and an unusual scale, but that’s it. This visual language was actually established in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. So its absence here is conspicuous. As I noted in Make It So, these signals make it very clear to the observer that what they are observing is media—i.e. not real. Of course the real reason these VPs lack those signals is because this show had the budget of this blog post, but can we find a diegetic reason?
Surprisingly, I think yes. Kid’s media is different than regular media. Just like we pretend that Santa Claus is real for young children until they’re old enough to start to think critically about it, perhaps special effort is taken on these VPs to make it really immersive for the hairy kiddo. He doesn’t get the it’s-not-real signals because they want him to believe that it is.
Which is some fine holiday apologetics, if I do say so myself.
In the center of the kitchen, mounted to the ceiling, is a Garden Center. Out of use, it retracts out of reach, but anyone in the family can say Fruit, please and the Garden Center drops down to allow fresh grapes to be plucked right off the vine. When done, Marty Jr. tells it to retract with a thump on it, and it retracts back up to its resting place near the ceiling.
This is wonderful. Responds to many types of inputs and keeps healthy, fresh fruit available to the family at any time.
