Tag Archives: encyclopedia

5E-opedia: In-depth topic

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WPmode2

Leeloo learns about the facts of the human race which she is destined to save through an online encyclopedia available to her in many places: in Cornelius’’ home, the spaceship to Fhloston Paradise, and aboard Zorg’’s ship. Three modes are seen for it. Today we discuss the second mode, which is to select an in-depth topic.

In-Depth Topic

Leeloo can understand each item in the topic lists as they fly past. If she sees a topic that interests her in particular, she can press a button to find out more about that topic in more detail. (We don’t see the button, we just hear it.) Given that she’s looking at a screen of at most 66 and at least 4 options, and we don’t see a selection indicator, it’s anyone’s guess as to how she does this. Later we’ll see that she has a QWERTY keyboard to search for a particular word, and we don’t see that same search interface here, so it’s something other than that.

Once she indicates that she’s interested in martial arts, the entry fills the screen. The screen is a mix of a paragraph of text, images zooming around, and subtopics writ in large red majuscule letters scrolling past: KRAV CONTACT, SUMO, WRESTLING, SAVATE, KUNG FU, JU JITSU, NINJITSU, WRANG DO, FULL CONTACT… A still image of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon appears. This style of still-image and animated-text continues to play in a watch-and-learn way until it’s done, and then returns to the topic list.

TheFifthElement-Waco-siege

Here, as before, I am examining things unmeant for examination. Still, I have a job to do. In the diegesis of the film, the text flies by too quick for anyone but a perfect Mondoshawan to read. But here in the real world, I hit pause. There I learned that the paragraph of text in the background has nothing to do with martial arts. We only see snippets, but they read as follows. (Please post your short sci-fi stories that can make sense of these lines in exactly this same order.)

: a hindu thus
talks to hi[s] troops about taking
d takes on a persona of its own.
monster, if it wants to live, have
loved. We then get a news flash
cult (think Waco siege coverage)

This little bit of text reads much more like a script than an encyclopedia entry. Like it was a bit of text just lying around on someone’s computer. In any case it would not help Leeloo learn Jeet Kun Do in the slightest.

On the right side of the screen (see above) we also see a vertical green rectangle. At the top is the number 5, bookended with arrows. Below that is a graph, a set of thumbnail images (whose captions are too small to read) are linked by right-angle connecting lines, like what you might see in a tech-tree for a real-time strategy video game.

TheFifthElement-greenmenu

When the display shifts to showing the subtopics, this green area changes. The 5 changes to a dot, and a grid of circular icons appears, each with a green rectangle to its right. The left column of icons is hard to decipher, but the right column of icons looks like control buttons one might expect: More detail, next in sequence, prior in sequence, zoom out, zoom all the way out, fast forward. Missing are common controls for video such as pause and play. A the bottom is a button labeled “EDIT”. This control panel is not seen in use.

It’s still about the learning, stupid

That stuff on the left is pointless. Of course that bit from a script is goofy. The animated stuff might be interesting for getting someone kind of excited about the topic, or maybe to remember how awesome martial arts (that they already knew about) are, but for learning any of it from a computer screen, she would have been better off spending time on youtube. Even the subtopics make no sense. Sure, they’re all martial arts, but what’s the order? Not alphabetical. Not age. Savate (18th century) is between wrestling and Sumo, both far more ancient. It’s not even a list of the same scope of thing. Aren’t Krav and Full Contact different translations for the same thing? Anyway, learning the vocabulary of a domain is only a rudimentary first step to actually learning it, much less performing it. Good thing she’s “perfect.”

The first green area on the right does actually seem useful for learning. It’s an abstract representation of how some things fit together. There’s a relationship implied between parts. It may also provide a map to a bigger picture in which this particular topic fits. That’s actually pretty useful and even Wikipedia adopts it for entries that fit into larger domains of knowledge. So, OK, we’ll cut it some slack there.

The second green area, even though I’m doing a lot of inference there from icons, also seems like it might be pretty useful. It’s too bad we don’t get to see it in action.

Better for Leeloo’s purposes of learning a topic—even if you did it blazingly fast—would be to provide her a definition, a bit about the history, and then some blazingly fast how-tos of modern practice augmented with the principles at work in each of the examples.

5E-opedia: Watch and learn

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WPmode1

Leeloo learns about the facts of the human race which she is destined to save through an online encyclopedia available to her in many places: in Cornelius’’ home, the spaceship to Fhloston Paradise, and aboard Zorg’’s ship. Three modes are seen for it. Today we discuss the first mode, which is just play-and-watch.

Watch-and-learn

When we first see her using the (unnamed) encyclopedia, she is simply watching four columns of words quickly scroll by. The words are arranged alphabetically, top-to-bottom before continuing to the next column. There is a large, blinking, lower-case letter reversed out of a white square in the lower left. Near the middle of the screen, a thick bracket emphasizes four of the words from the screen and red lines connects each of the words to a large image on the right side of the screen. The words and pictures fly by at a rate that’s impossible for us mere humans to follow, but Cornelius assures David that she”s ‘learning our history…the last 5,000 years she’s missed. She’s been asleep for quite a while, you know.”

fifthelement-151

This mode is all passive. When in the scene Leeloo goes to grab a turkey from the kitchen to bring back and eat, the screen is still moving with no one in front of it. We see a menu of capital letters, and a selection moving from “A” to “M”, by itself.

The Tyranny of Pause

Here I’m going to have to break the usual stance with which I review interfaces. That is, I usually treat each interface as if it was perfectly as it should be in the world of the movie or TV show, trying to willfully ignore its speculative nature. (That’s how we can make it relevant to our real world work.) But here, there’s just too much that’s broken in the content to make any sense. You only notice it when you slow the movie down to read and examine the screens, so this is totally unfair. But then again, the DVD format had been in the world for two years by the time The Fifth Element came out, so there’s not a great excuse for playback technology. They could presume it would eventually be paused.

First off, the words in the lists are repeated. The first column is identical to the third. The second is identical to the fourth. I can’t imagine a good reason why this would help a reader. I was hoping maybe there was some autostereogram thing going on, but no. It just adds noise.

Secondly, the vast majority of images have little to do with the words to which they’re connected. “Me” points to a halved cantaloupe filled with blackberries. (See the image above.) “Maunder” points to an image of a woman’s softly parted, lipsticked lips. What on earth is Leeloo meant to learn from that? (Also I think it’s high time we bring back maunder into common usage.)

TheFifthElement-maunder

Worse, the images repeat. So the same picture of a chimpanzee connects to both “meadow” and “matriarch.” The same picture of a nose (flipped horizontally once) connects to “nav(vv?)y,” “nefarious,” and “negate.”

Also the same word may appear multiple times, connected to different pictures. “Maw” points once to a mouth, which is sensible, but once to a full-body portrait of a model in a little black dress. I’m all for polysemy and homonymy, but this just makes no sense.

Only once does the connection make absolute sense, as “Napoleon” points to François Gérard’s 1804 portrait of “Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, at Malmaison.”

TheFifthElement-Napoleon

Now I understand the tough challenge the interface designers faced: They probably had zero time, the damned thing had to look…well…encyclopedic, it had to make Leeloo look like a learning machine, no one had the budget or time to create new media for all these entries. Plus Larry Lessig wouldn’t found the Creative Commons organization for four years later. But…still.

Sometimes the words are arbitrarily cut off, as in “mayonnais” and “masturbat.” (Both the prurient-minded and those prone to conspiracies about subliminal influence may note that the word “masturbat~” appears three times, twice as a full word, and once cut off in this way.)

So, in short, unless she’s studying the Dada Encyclopedia, this display just makes no sense.

Um…learning?

Even if the images didn’t repeat, the words didn’t repeat, the images made sense for the words, and words appeared fully spelled out, it’s a ridiculous display for what Leeloo is trying to do. At best, this might be able to teach her the written words for some concrete things. But even this is doubtful. How does she know that “Napoleon” as a word means a particular individual rather than the word for a painted portrait, or the name of the uniform being depicted? Without going too far into history or learning theory, we can say that Leeloo would need exposure to some propositional language to understand history as interrelated events occurring across time, and an alphabetical list of words and pictures just isn’t enough.

Krell technology

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Morbius is the inheritor of a massive underground complex of technology once belonging to a race known as the Krell. As Morbius explains, ““In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty and noble race of beings which called themselves the Krell….”

Morbius tours Adams and Doc through the Krell technopolis.

“Ethically as well as technologically, they were a million years ahead of humankind; for in unlocking the mysteries of nature they had conquered even their baser selves… “…seemingly on the threshold of some supreme accomplishment which was to have crowned their entire history, this all but divine race perished in a single night.

““In the centuries since that unexplained catastrophe even their cloud-piercing towers of glass and porcelain and adamantine steel have crumbled back into the soil of Altair, and nothing——absolutely nothing——remains above ground.””

Despite this advancement, unless we ascribe to the Krell some sort of extra sensory perception and control, much of the technology we see has serious design flaws.

Morbius plays half-a-million-year-old Krell music.

The first piece of technology is a Krell recorded-music player, which Morbius keeps on the desk in his study. The small cylindrical device stands upright, bulging slighty around its middle. It is made of a gray metal, with a translucent pink band just below the middle. A hollow button sits on top.

The cylinder rests in a clear plastic base, with small, identical metal slugs sitting upright in recessions evenly spaced around it. To initiate music playback, Morbius picks one of the slugs and inserts it into the hollow of the button. He then depresses the momentary button once. The pink translucent band illuminates, and music begins to flow from unseen speakers around the office.

Modern audiences have a good deal of experience with music players, and so the device raises a great many questions. How does a user know which slug relates to what music? The slugs all look the same so this seems difficult at best. How does a user eject the slug? If by upending the device, one hopes that the cylinder comes free from the base easily, or the other slugs will all fall out as well. It must have impressed audiences to see music contained in such small containers, but otherwise the device is more attractive than usable.

Morbius inputs the combination to open the door.

Many Krell doors are protected by a combination lock. The mechanism stands high enough that Morbius can easily reach out and operate it. Its large circular face has four white triangles printed on its surface at the cardinal points, and other geometric red and yellow markings around the remainder. A four-spoke handle is anchored to a swivel joint at the center of the face. To unlock the door, a user twists the handle such that one of its spokes lines up with the north point, and then angles the handle to touch the spoke to the triangle there, before returning the handle to a neutral angle and twisting to the next position in the combination. When the sequence is complete, the triangles, the tips of the spokes, and a large ring around the face all light up and blink as the two-plane aperture doors slide open.

Even Walter Pigeon has trouble making sense of this awkward device. There appear to be no snap-to affordances for the neutral angle of the handle or the cardinal orientations, leaving the user unsure if each step in the sequence has been received correctly. Additionally, if the combination consists of particular spokes at this one point, why are the spokes undifferentiated? If the combination consists of pointing to different triangles, why are there four spokes instead of one? Is familiarity with some subtle cue part of the security measures?

Morbius shares operation of the Krell encyclopedia.

All of Krell wisdom and knowledge is contained in a device that Morbius shows to Adams and Doc. It consists of an underlit scroll of material sliding beneath a rectangular hole cut in the surface of a table. To illuminate it, Morbius turns one of the two ridged green dials located to the left of the “screen” about 45 degrees clockwise. To move the scroll, Morbius turns the other green dial clockwise as well.

Why is the least frequently used dial, i.e. the power button, closer than the more frequently used button, i.e. the scroll wheel? This requires the reader to be stretched awkwardly. Why is the on-off dial free spinning? There appear to be only two states: lit and unlit. The dial should have two states as well. If the content of the pages is discretely chunked into pages, it would also argue for a click-stop rather than free-spinning dial as well, but we do not get a good look at the scroll contents. One might also question the value of a scroll as the organizing method for a vast body of information, since related bits of information may be distractingly far apart.