Tag Archives: binoculars

Fritzes 2026: Best Interfaces

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The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition.

Today we’ll be covering Best Interfaces. The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology.

The winner of the Best Interfaces award for 2025 is Section 31.

As you’ll read below, my posts on the winner will be a series rather than a single post, so let me do one Also Check Out here. 

Bust first, also check out: Superman

Though I have some issues with the amount of fuigetry in most of the screens, and how Lex has to call out countermoves rather than have an assistant offer next most likely countermoves; the robots in the Fortress of Solitude and the crazy-cool gestural control of his spheres by Mr. Terrific make me think that interfaces and tech will not be an afterthought in DC’s new Gunn era. 

A futuristic scene featuring two characters in advanced helmets observing a holographic figure displayed on a device within an icy environment.
A character dressed as Superman lies on a futuristic platform surrounded by humanoid robots.
A humanoid robot dressed in a blue cape interacts with various futuristic controls and glowing crystals in a sci-fi laboratory.
A control room scene featuring a person operating multiple high-tech computer monitors displaying green radar-like graphics. The individual is wearing a headset and appears focused and engaged.
A woman wearing a headset is seated at a high-tech control station, monitoring multiple screens displaying aerial views of urban buildings with data overlays.
A high-tech control room featuring multiple computer screens displaying a heatmap visualization of two figures engaged in a physical altercation, with a person in a headset observing the data.
A futuristic hover vehicle flying over a dense cityscape, with passengers visible inside.
A person flying with a futuristic jetpack over a dense green forest, holding a digital interface display in front of them.
A digital display showing a split view of a hazardous underwater environment with glowing lava and debris, overlaid with red targeting graphics and depth measurements.
A retro-styled computer console displaying red text and data on a screen, with various buttons and controls in a dark environment.
A futuristic setting with multiple screens displaying data in the background. A humanoid figure in a suit stands in the background while a creature with textured skin and a fur-like coat interacts with a glowing object in the foreground. A stylized humanoid statue is seen on the left.
A person monitoring a high-tech screen displaying a cityscape with a superhero figure flying alongside a drone.
A high-tech monitor displaying a holographic image of two figures interacting, surrounded by digital interface elements and controls.

(James: reach out and I’ll send you a free copy of my book about assistants, it would have helped with that Luthor interface.)

The 2026 Best Interfaces Award goes to
Star Trek: Section 31

Maybe I was out of the loop, but I don’t recall hearing a lot of buzz about this movie at the time it came out. But when I finally caught it, I was impressed with the breadth, the art direction, and some interfaces of a sort I don’t think I’ve documented before. This year I’m going to honor the winner with an old-school breakdown, interface-by-interface. In this post we’ll start with a general overview, and then move to the Mission Briefer.

Note I try to only describe just enough so the interfaces can be understood, but since this is a cloak-and-dagger spy thriller, it’s still pretty intricate.

Banner displaying the text 'MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD' in a bold, stylized font, set against a cosmic background.

Plot overview

In the Mirror Universe of Star Trek, the mostly-good United Federation of Planets doesn’t exist. Instead it has a morally-inverse counterpart called the Terran Empire. Philippa Georgiou became ruler of this evil empire in part by defeating and enslaving the ambitious contender San. Once ascended, she exercised cruelty and ruthlessness until sci-fi shenanigans landed her in Prime Universe (the home universe of the shows), in 2257.

[Here I bypass a lot of stuff that happened in Discovery for the sake of brevity.]

A stylish woman with long blue nails and a glamorous outfit is posed at a bar, playfully blowing kisses with a serene expression while illuminated by soft lighting.

Eventually she takes up an alias as “Madame Veronique du Franc”, proprietor of the pleasure space station Baraam, outside Federation territory. Section 31—essentially the Federation’s black ops—sends a team to blackmail Georgiou to help them intercept a superweapon, which happens to be en route to Baraam in the hands of a shady middleman named Dada Noe.

A serious-looking man with a short beard and styled hair, wearing a dark, textured jacket, staring intently.
A man in a futuristic armored suit stands confidently inside a high-tech control room, featuring various glowing screens and controls in the background.
A female character with a bald head, wearing a sparkly silver dress, seated in a futuristic setting with illuminated control panels in the background.
A man in a stylish patterned suit stands in a futuristic setting, with blue and red lighting in the background.
A woman with a blue bob hairstyle and bold makeup, looking contemplatively to the side with dramatic lighting in the background.
Close-up of an alien creature with a large head and expressive eyes, set against a futuristic, colorful background.
A character with pointed ears and blonde hair wearing a red jacket and multiple necklaces stands in a futuristic, dimly lit setting with glowing controls and panels in the background.

The team consists of their superstrong “augment” leader Alok Sahar, a mech-suit guy named Zeph, a seductress named Melle, a shape-shifting genius called Quasi, a buttoned-up Federation overseer named Garrett, and Fuzz, a microscopic Nanokin who pilots a teeny tiny spaceship and most often inhabits a black market Vulcan-looking android body.

Using some technologies called Phase Pods, Georgiou successfully separates the superweapon from Noe only to have it intercepted by a masked person also wearing a phase pod. Masked person kills Melle and escapes with the superweapon, but on the way Georgiou learns it is the Godsend, a quadrant-vaporizing weapon she had commissioned when she was Terran Emperor.

A woman in a dark purple outfit leans forward with an intense expression, looking at a decorative object in front of her.

Georgiou convinces Sahar to form a partnership to recapture the weapon. They beam to his spaceship above a desolate planet where they interrogate Noe. They learn Noe is from the Mirror Universe, where he administered a facility that housed the Godsend. He hatched a plan to sell it and with the money escape to Prime Universe to retire in peace. His portal is an unknown but routinely opening rift between worlds. He tells them he is scheduled to meet his anonymous buyer when the rift next appears in four hours. He expects that if he does not deliver the weapon to his buyer—and the Terran Empire learns that the Godsend is gone—they will trace it to the rift, surge through, and conquer Prime. At that moment a massive explosion rips through the ship. The computer automatically beams the crew to the surface, but Noe dies in fiery debris. (Narratively convenient, but consider that the ship’s computer knew enough to beam our protagonists to safe, non-fiery-debris places, raising the possibility that it chose to murder Noe.)

Sahar says the explosion was sabotage by someone working with the still-unknown Godsend thief. One of them is a mole! Accusations fly, but Garrett focuses them on finding a derelict garbage scow she knows about, as a means to continue their mission. The team splits. Georgiou, Quasi, and Fuzz search for the scow. Sahar, Garette, and Zeph work to repair an antenna in an old Section 31 safehouse so they can warn the Federation of the impending danger.

Team Scow repairs the ship. We see Fuzz behaving a little strangely.

A tall structure emitting a powerful beam of orange light into the night sky, surrounded by trees and a dark landscape.

Meanwhile Zeph skips out on Team Antenna. While Sahar and Garrett search for him, the antenna gets activated, some message sent, and then the antenna is destroyed. The whole team rejoins and begins a search for Zeph. They find him dead. When they recover the video from his mech suit, they see something was controlling his suit and made him kill himself. Georgiou reasons that the mole must be Fuzz, who left his Vulcanbot on autopilot while he flew to Zeph to hook in and control him to commit the crimes and fly back to his bot. Thusly busted, Fuzz takes remote control of Zeph’s suit (grossly with Zeph’s corpse still in it) and the two try to escape on a float. The rest of the crew pursues in a second float, and there’s a vehicle combat sequence. Fuzz tells Georgiou that he’s been working with San. Then San beams Fuzz up to his ship. San speeds toward the rift to tell the Empire everything and begin the invasion. The remaining team gets the scow running and gives chase.

They catch up near the rift and the scow tries to delay its entry into the rift via tractor beam. Sahar and Georgiou beam to San’s ship to learn that San has initiated the Godsend. San fights Georgiou. Sahar fights Vulcanbot while Fuzz escapes to watch from a safe distance. On board the scow, Garrett forges a makeshift weapon in the ship’s hold and they release it at San’s ship. It lands and explodes, giving the heroes the upper hand in their respective fights. Georgiou grabs and activates the Godsend via biometric signature. Quasi manages to beam her and Sahar back to the scow just in time, leaving San, Fuzz, Vulcanbot, and the Godsend to be destroyed in the explosion as it passes back to the Mirror Universe and seal the rift forever. (And, presumably, something about the confluence of energies neuters the Godsend so it doesn’t go on to kill quadrillions in the quadrant where the rift happened to be, because that would be multiple, multiple genocides and sully whatever victory this is.)

Group of three people toasting with drinks in a stylish, futuristic setting.

The movie ends with the team back on the Baraam. They meet Wisp, Fuzz’ widow, piloting a second bootleg Vulcanbot. They receive a mission briefing that has them warping the Baraam (surprise, it’s also a spaceship) towards Turkana IV.

A futuristic spaceship with swirling metallic structures, set against a dark starry background in outer space.

Whew.

Star Trek: Section 31 is primarily set in the 24th-century “Lost Era” between 2324–2326. This places it roughly 66 years after Discovery (2258) and about 40 years before The Next Generation. For continuity, the designers have to find some middle ground between the glowing, 3D, multiplanar translucency of Disco and the flat, 2D, highly-graphic, vibrant oranges-and-blues palette of LCARS. I think they did a really nice job. We see circular, glowing interfaces. We see hints of the fully realized LCARS to come.

A handheld device displaying a character's image with a bloodied face and the text 'MATCH DETECTED' highlighted on the screen.
A person holding a futuristic device displaying a face on the screen, with various data and interface elements visible around the display.
A hand holding a futuristic device displaying a digital map with topographical lines and a central red dot.

There’s also a clear delineation between Federation/Section 31 interfaces, the mining colony interfaces, the few Terran Empire interfaces we see, and those of the foreign-language garbage scow.

A person in a flowing gown stands before a large, intricately designed circular pedestal featuring a golden dragon sculpture, surrounded by a dimly lit, atmospheric environment with glowing elements and red accents.
A close-up of a futuristic control panel displaying various digital readouts and a 3D model of a spacecraft, with a hand interacting with the touchscreen.
Futuristic cockpit interface displaying 'Conveyance Autopilot Engaged' with various control elements and glowing indicators.

San’s ship interior, by the way, is high-contrast red-on-black, and very pointy, making me wonder if the production designers have read my post on the Design of Evil, because it is practically an archetype of those patterns.

A futuristic red spaceship with illuminated edges flying near a large planet, resembling Mars, in a starry space backdrop.
Interior view of a futuristic setting with dramatic lighting, featuring sleek architectural lines and illuminated surfaces.
Two figures in futuristic attire stand in a high-tech environment filled with red and blue LED lights and streaks. Sparks are flying as they navigate the space, suggesting an action scene.

Anyway, now that we have a grasp on the plot, next let’s look more closely at those interfaces.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9603060/Currently streaming on:

Next up: The mission briefer

High Tech Binoculars

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In Johnny Mnemonic we see two different types of binoculars with augmented reality overlays and other enhancements: Yakuz-oculars, and LoTek-oculars.

Yakuz-oculars

The Yakuza are the last to be seen but also the simpler of the two. They look just like a pair of current day binoculars, but this is the view when the leader surveys the LoTek bridge.

jm-25-yakuza-binocs-adjusted

I assume that the characters here are Japanese? Anyone?

In the centre is a fixed-size green reticule. At the bottom right is what looks like the magnification factor. At the top left and bottom left are numbers, using Western digits, that change as the binoculars move. Without knowing what the labels are I can only guess that they could be azimuth and elevation angles, or distance and height to the centre of the reticule. (The latter implies some sort of rangefinder.)

So far, this is a simple uncluttered display. But why is there a brightly glowing Pharmakom logo at the top right? It blocks part of the view, and probably doesn’t help anyone trying to keep their eyes adapted for night vision.

LoTek-oculars

The LoTeks, despite their name, have more impressive binoculars. They’re first used when Johnny gets out of his airport taxi.

jm-11-lotek-binocs-a-adjusted

There’s a third tube above the optics, a rectangular inlet, and an antenna.

In these binoculars, the augmented reality overlay is much more dynamic. Instead of a fixed circle, green lines converge in a bounding box around the image of Johnny. Text slides onto the display from left to right, the last line turning yellow.

jm-11-loteks-animated

Zoomrect

The animated transition of the bounding box resembles what Classic MacOS programmers of the 1990s called “zoomrects” used for showing windows opening or closing. It’s a very effective technique to draw attention to a particular area of an image.

Animated text

Text appearing character by character is ubiquitous in film interfaces. In the 1960s and 1970s mainframe and minicomputer terminals really did display incrementally, as the characters arrived one by one over slow serial port links. On any more recent computer it actually takes extra programming to achieve this effect, as the normal display of text is so fast that we would perceive it as instantaneous. But people like to see incremental text, or have been conditioned by film to expect it, so why not?

Bioscanning

The binoculars detect Johnny’s implant. It might just be possible to detect this passively from infrared or electronic signals, but more likely the binoculars include a high resolution microwave radar as well. If there had been more than one person in view, the bounding box would indicate which one the text refers to. And note that the last line of text is a different color. What that means is unclear here, but it becomes clear (and I’ll discuss it) later.

The second time we see the LoTek binoculars is when a lookout spots Street Preacher, a very bad guy and another who wants to remove Johnny’s head. Once again the binoculars have performed more than just a visual scan.

jm-17-lotek-binocs-a-adjusted

The binocular view and overlay are being relayed to another character, the LoTek leader J-Bone who can watch on a monitor. Here the film anticipates the WiFi webcam.

jm-17-lotek-binocs-b-adjusted

The overlay text now changes.

jm-17-lotek-binocs-c-adjusted

Narrow AI?

This is interesting, because the binoculars can not only detect implants and other cyborg modifications, but are apparently able to evaluate and offer advice. It appears that the green text is used for the factual (more or less) information about what has been detected, while yellow text is uncertain or or speculative.

Does this imply a general artificial intelligence? Not necessarily. This warning could be based solely on the detected signature, in the same way that current day military passive sonars and radar warning receivers can identify threats based on identifying characteristics of a received signal. In the world of Johnny Mnemonic it would make sense to assume that anyone with full custom biomechanics is extremely dangerous. Or, since Street Preacher is a resident rather than a stranger and already feared by others, his appearance and the warning could have been entered into a LoTek facial recognition database that the binocular system uses as a reference.

These textual overlays are an excellent interface, not interfering with normal vision and providing a fast and easy-to-understand analysis. But, the user must have faith that the computer analysis is accurate. There’s no reason given as to why any of the text is displayed. If Johnny was carrying an implant in his pocket instead of his brain, would the computer know the difference?

An alternative approach would be some kind of sensor fusion or false spectrum display, with the raw infrared or radar image overlaid over the visuals and the viewer responsible for interpreting the data. The problem with such systems is that our visual system didn’t evolve to interpret such imagery, so a lot of training and practice is required to be both fast and accurate. And the overlay itself interferes with our normal visual recognition and processing. If the computer can do a better job of deciphering the meaning of non-visual data, it should do so and summarise for the human viewer.

Further advantages of this interface are that even a novice sentry will benefit from the built-in scanning and threat analysis, and the wireless transmission ensures that the information is shared rather than being limited to the person on watch. 

Binoculars

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BttF_023

Doc Brown uses some specialized binoculars to verify that Marty’ Jr. is at the scene according to plan. He flips them open and puts his eyes up to them. When we see his view, a reticle of green corners is placed around the closest individual in view. In the lower right hand corner are three measurements, “DIST,” gamma, and “XYZ.” These numbers change continuously. A small pair of graphics at the bottom illustrate whether the reticle is to left or right of center.

BttF_025

As discussed in Chapter 8 of Make It So, augmented reality systems like this can have several awarenesses, and this has some sensor display and people awareness. I’m not sure what use the sensor data is to Doc, and the people detector seems unable to track a single individual consistently.

BttF_024

So, a throwaway interface that doesn’t help much beyond looking gee-whiz(1989).

Scav dual-monoculars

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As Jack searches early in the film for Drone 172, he parks his bike next to a sinkhole in the desert and cautiously peers into it. As he does so, he is being observed from afar by a sinister looking Scav through a set of asymmetrical…well, it’s not exactly right to call them binoculars.

scav_oculars_04

They look kind of binocular, but that term technically refers to a machine that displays two slighty-offset images shown independently to each eye such that the user perceives stereopsis, or a single field in 3D. But a quick shot from the Scav’s perspective shows that this is not what is shown at all.

scavnolculars

This device’s two lenses take in different spectrums of light and displays them side by side, with a little (albeit inscrutable) augmentation at the periphery. The larger display on the left appears to be visible light and the smaller on the right appears—based on the strong highlight around the bike’s engine and Jack’s body—to be infrared, or heat.

At this point in the story, the audience is meant to believe that the scavs are still the evil alien race, and this interface helps to convey that. It seems foreign, mysterious. All of its typographic elements (letters, numbers, symbols) are squeezed into little more than 4×4 grids of pixels, so we’re not even sure if this is a human language. So, fine, this interface serves its narrative purpose here. “Oh my,” we must think, “…he is being watched. But by what? And why?”

But after we find out [again, spoilers] that the scavs are the Terran survivors after the Tet attack, we can look at this again to understand that this interface is for humans, and with that in mind it does not fare well.

Yes, the periphery is augmented, so that’s good, but the information is unusably small, and forces the user to glance back and forth between the two images to put the disparate information together.

Two views reduce the amount of information

It almost goes without saying, but let’s say it—by dividing the available display into two halves, the amount of visual information provided to the Scav is roughly a quarter of what it would be with a single view. And since the purpose of the device is to magnify, this is a significant loss.

Two views add work

In this scene, which is quite barren, it’s very easy to tell that the objects that are warm in the right are the only two objects on the left, but if you imagine looking at a cityscape, where the bomb (hot) looks very much like every other thing around it, you can see where piecing those two disparate views together in your head can become problematic.

This is made worse when the views aren’t even positionally synchronized. In the gif below you’ll see that when you superimpose them, they drift away from each other, making the comparison between the two even more difficult. There are diegetic reasons why this might have happened, but rather than reverse engineering why, let’s just leave it that it makes using it more difficult.

scavnolculars_overlaid

The blur and low-contrast don’t help

Note that the thermal view is blurrier and lower-contrast. That might be an artifact of the diegetic tech, but it would confound quick mapping in a complex image. Even if it’s just a lower-res image, at least the device should perform some auto-leveling and sharpening functions on the live image to help make it easy to use.

Having one scaled makes it worse

The scaling makes the mapping of items from one screen to the other more difficult. Again, in the Oblivion example, there are two objects on the left and two objects on the right, and the “horizons” on which they walk are roughly aligned, so it’s trivial to track one to the other. But if the image is highly repetitive—say for example, a building—the scaling would make it difficult to map the useful point-of-interest on the right to the best-resolution image on the left. Quick…in which window is the sniper?

scav_oculars_buildings

A more direct solution

Better would be a live augmentation of a single, visual-light image. The visual light is the best anchor to the real world, with augmentation helping to convey specialness to the objects in the scene. In the comp below, you’ll see a single image where the “hot spots” have been augmented with a soft red and some trend lines in white. That red color is not arbitrary, by the way. It builds on the human experience with black body radiation associations of red == hot. This saves the (quite human) user both the physical work of glancing back and forth and the extra cognitive processing to recall that green/yellow == heat.

scav_oculars_comp

Ectogoggles

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When the Ghostbusters are called to the Sedgewick Hotel, they track a ghost called Slimer from his usual haunt on the 12th floor to a ballroom. There Ray dons a pair of asymmetrical goggles that show him information about the “psycho-kinetic energy (PKE) valences” in the area. (The Ghostbusters wiki—and of course there is such a thing—identifies these alternately as paragoggles or ectogoggles.) He uses the goggles to peek from behind a curtain to look for Slimer.

Ghostbusters_binoculars_02

Far be it for this humble blog to try and reverse-engineer what PKE valences actually are, but let’s presume it generally means ghosts and ghost related activity. Here’s an animated gif of the display for your ghostspotting pleasure.

Ghostoculars_gif

As he scans the room, we see a shot from his perspective. Five outputs augment the ordinary view the googles offer.

1. A plan position indicator (like what you see on a radar) sweeps around and around in the upper left hand corner, but never displays anything (even when Slimer appears.)

2. A bar graph on the left side that wavers up and down until Slimer is spotted, when it jumps to maximum. The bar graph adheres to the basic visual principle of “up means more.” The bar graph is colored with a stoplight gradient, with red at the bottom, yellow in the middle, and a bright screen-green at the top. Note that the graph builds from the bottom until it hits maximum, when its glow slides to the top to fully illuminate only the uppermost block. This is a special “max” mode that strongly draws the user’s attention.

3. There is a 7-segment red LED number display just below the graph, which you might think is a numerical version of the same data, but we only see it increment steadily from 03094 to 03051 during the first scan, then after a cutaway to Ray’s face, we see it drop to 01325 and continue to increment steadily until it hits 1333, where it remains steady and begins to blink. It hits this maximum about a half a second before the graph jumps to its max.

graph

4. In the very lower left is a red mode label reading “KER,” which blinks until the numbers hit 01333 in the second sequence, when KER disappears and is replaced with a steadily-glowing green “MAX.”

What the heck is KER? I don’t think there’s any diegetic answer. Ker might be an extradiegetic shout-out to Rick Kerrigan, who was production supervisor for Entertainment Effects Group / Boss Film Studios for the film, but that’s just a guess. Otherwise I got nothin’. Anyone else?

5. In the lower right is a blurry light that blinks red until Slimer is spotted, when it blinks the same screen-green as the bar graph, sweep, and MAX label.

Narratively, this is a tone interface, that doesn’t add anything to the plot, and only helps us experience and understand how it is the busters do their busting. As a tone interface, making these changes would help improve believability without affecting the plot.

Ghostbusters_binoculars_08

How to better support busting

The immediate improvements you could make to this as a “real” ghostbusting tool are fairly obvious:

  • Make the plan position indicator, you know, work.
  • Have the numbers match the graph, or, if they’re actually measuring different things, put the LED display on the other side of the view.
  • I’d change the graph color indicating no-PKE to black or dark gray. Red often connotes danger, and really, if there’s no PKE, you’re safe from the supernatural. Plus the blackbody radiation spectrum has a more physical reference and is therefore more immediate.
  • You could even lose the bar diagram—which requires looking away from the view—and replace it with a line around the view that changes color similarly. This puts the augmentation in the periphery.
  • Lose the distracting blinking red light entirely. It draws attention at a time when the Buster’s eyes need to be on the view, and it’s just duplicating information already provided in a better way by the graph.

But we can do those improvements better. In the augmented reality chapter of the book, I identified levels of awareness for these devices. The ectogoggles are an example of the simplest type, of sensor display, with the sweep giving an unfulfilled promise of the second type, location awareness. We can make even bigger improvements by considering the other levels, i.e. context and goal awareness.

Context Awareness

Context awareness implies a more sophisticated system with image recognition and display capabilities. Could the paragoggles help draw attention to where on the view the PKE is most concentrated, and how those readings are trending? Of course this wouldn’t be so important when the ghost is actually visible, but if it could lead his eyes to where the ghost is most likely going to be, it would be more useful and save him even the microseconds of an eye saccade.

A second aspect of context awareness is object or people recognition. If the goggles could recognize individual ghosts, the display be improved with some information about this particular ghost—or its category—from a database. What’s its name? What methods have failed or worked in the past to control it? Even if it doesn’t know these things, it can provide an alert that it is an UNKNOWN ENTITY, which is spooky sounding and tells the Ghostbusters to be on high alert since anything could happen.

Goal awareness

Lastly, they could be improved with goal awareness. The Ghostbusters aren’t birdwatchers. They’re there to capture that ugly spud. Can it help guide each person as to the best time to gear up the proton packs (or do it for them), where to position themselves as well as the trap, and finally when and where to fire? Certainly someone as scatterbrained as Ray could use that kind of assistance.

Ghostbusters_binoculars_00

Federation Binoculars

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When conducting reconnaissance on the bug home Planet P, Rico pauses to scan the nearby mountain crest with a pair of Federation binoculars. They feature two differently-sized objective lenses.

StarshipTroopers_binoculars_01

We get a POV for him and get to see the overlay. It includes a range-finding reticle and two 7-segment readouts in the lower corners. It looks nifty, but it’s missing some important things.

Rangefinding reticles typically place enumerated marks at regular angular degrees. The numbers make calculating angular widths easy. They also typically include small areas along axes of densely-clustered ticks for precision measurements at the edges of objects. Without these features, it makes the act of measuring angular width difficult.

What the numbers represent is a bit of a mystery. You’d expect it to be distance, but the readouts don’t match that. Even though the view passes from the near forward slope to the mid range peak to the distant grassland beyond—in that order—the lower left number continually increments from the 1500s to the 1600s. The lower right number fluctuates within the 2100 range somewhat randomly with no correlation to the apparent distance. So…no way to tell.

StarshipTroopers_binoculars_02

Lastly, the overlay is very subtle. So subtle, in fact, it’s difficult to see them when against the highly chiaroscuro background of the scarp. Ideally the overlay would dynamically adjust to the background to always remain at the same apparent contrast.

StarshipTroopers_binoculars_03