Santa Tech: Rise of the Guardians (2012)

24 Dec 2023 by Christopher Noessel

We interrupt the 3D file browsing series for this Santa-holiday one-off post. If you’re trapped somewhere needing design-and-Santa-related distraction, here’s a bunch of words, images, and links for you.

Longtime readers may recall the Who Did it Better? Santa Claus edition from 2020, in which I took a look at speculative interfaces that help Santa Claus do his Saintly Nick business. (If not, check it out at the link above, especially if you need a refresher on the core myth.) Earlier this year a dear friend mentioned Rise the Guardians as an additional candidate. So I watched it, and hereby add it as an addendum to that study. I might make it a habit to do every year, because they aren’t going to stop making Santa movies anytime soon.

Spoiler alert: There aren’t many interfaces, and they don’t fare well, but the joy is in the analysis, so let’s dive in.

Quick plot recap

Children around the world are protected by a group called the Guardians:

North (Santa)
Tooth (the Tooth Fairy)
(the Easter) Bunnymund
Sandman

…all appointed by the mysterious Man in the Moon. Who is just the moon, communicating via moonbeams.

Pictured: A plot-critical character peering in through the shutter like some kind of celestial stalker.

One day, an ancient foe named Pitch Black returns, who plots to get all the children to stop believing in the guardians, thereby robbing them of their power and clearing the way for his fear-mongering world domination. In response, the Man in the Moon names a new Guardian to help defeat him: Jack Frost. Jack initially resists, but over the course of the film and the help of one special child, Jack comes around, learns to care, and helps defeat Pitch. Children around the world believe in him, and he formally joins the ranks of the Guardians.

Our heroes face off against Pitch. Sandman is Disney-dead at this point in the story, and so not pictured.

n.b. Santa’s are only a subset of the film’s devices

The abilities of the Guardians are a blend of innate magic and magic items, fueled with *vaguely gestures at childhood belief* and not a lot of observable cause-and-effect interfaces. For instance, when Pitch breaks Jack’s magic crook, Jack just holds the pieces and wills it back whole with glowy sparkliness and grunting psychic effort despite never having done anything like this before. No interfaces there. Magic things don’t really befit the usual sort of analysis done on this blog. But North does have three interfaces to do his gift-giving duties that bear the cold light of examination, you heartless, Vulcan bastards. (Yaaay! My people!)

Snow globes
Sleigh dashboard
The Belief Globe

(Tooth and her hummingbird-like Baby Teeth helpers have some proper interfaces as well, but are kind of creepy and this post is about Santa tech. Maybe I’ll do teeth tech interfaces later. Maybe March 6.)

Snow globes

These handheld spheres look like the popular winter decorations, but with no base by which they can rest on a surface. Instead they are kept loose in the user’s pocket until they are needed. By shaking it and speaking a destination, a preview of the destination appears on the inside, surrounded by swirls of “snow.” Then by pitching it like a baseball, the globe disappears in a puff, replaced with a circular portal to that destination. Move or toss something through, and the portal closes behind.

Two of North’s yetis use a snow globe to open a portal to the arctic citadel, and toss North’s sack (with a kidnapped Jack inside) through.

If this interface seems well-designed, that’s because the examples in the movie are damned convenient. Each time we see a snow globe used in the movie…

…the destination has a globally-unique name
…the destination has a unique and easily identifiable landmark to display in the globe
…the appearance of the destination is already known to the user, so the visual helps confirm the selection

But change any one of these, and it starts to fail. Consider if North, in the course of doing his Santa-ly duties, had to jump to a “San José.” There are at least 334 San Josés around the world. Very few of which have identifiable landmarks. How does North know the one that’s being visualized is the right one? He might have eidetic memory because of Рождество Христово magic or something, but these tools are used by the yetis, too, and I doubt they have that same gift.

How would it help them disambiguate? If the displayed destination is not the right one, how does the user provide more specificity to get to the right one? What if they only know the name? How does the snow globe help them narrow things down from 334 to 1? Since the globe disappears on use, and pockets have a limited capacity, the cost for getting it wrong can be quite high. The yetis might very well have to walk back to the North Pole should they run out.

Maybe, maybe, there are only a limited number of destinations possible, but then you’d expect some reference on the globe itself to help a user know that.

Pictured in the globe: a San José from Google Earth, and I’ll send a free PDF copy of the book to the first person who names which San José correctly, because I’m fairly confident it’s nigh-impossible.

It’s also worth noting that there’s no indication how the portals know when it’s OK to close, rather than say, chopping the traveler in half or leaving them stranded. Is it time-based? Where’s the countdown? Is it dependent on a code word or thought? How does the user know whether the code word has been received or rejected? Does the portal close as soon as a single, “whole object” passes through? Theseus would like a word. There’s no interface in evidence, so it must be “smart,” but as we know, “smart” is not always smart, and design is critical for making users more confident and avoiding costly errors. There are far too many unanswered questions to give this any stamp of approval.

Sleigh dashboard

North has a sleigh of course. It has a dashboard with some controls. One of these controls we see in use is a lever, whose purpose is a mystery. It can’t be a booster, since the motile force here is rangiferine, not mechanical. The control is shaped like an engine control lever on a boat or a thrust control on an airplane. After the switch is thrown, the camera cuts to a very blurry shot of the sleigh’s undercarriage where, if something happens, I can’t discern what is it. Maybe the runners go from flat to vertical, for a more ice-skating-like experience? Exacerbating our lack of information, the control is unlabeled, so it’s hard for a new user to know what it does, or what state it’s in, or what the options are. It has no safety mechanism, so depending on the force required, might be easily accidentally activated. Cannot recommend this, either.

This does…nothing? Are those arrows on the side meaningful? It’s hard to say.

The major element in the dashboard is a large globe inset in its center. It’s roughly shoulder-width in diameter. We never see it in use, but it bears great resemblance to the Belief Globe (see below). I want to believe it’s a you-are-here navigation device that automatically orients to match the position and bearing of the sleigh, because that might be useful. And it would be an awesome opportunity for a super-charming brass location indicator, mounted to a quarter-meridian arm. But I suspect this device is actually meant to be a miniaturized copy of the Belief Globe, which would not be useful for reasons you’ll read in the next section.

North and Jack chuckle at Bunnymund’s terror of flying. Fear is so funny.

The Belief Globe

This display is not explicitly named over the course of the movie, but I have to call it something. It is a huge globe that mechanically rotates in the center of North’s arctic fortress. It is covered with beautiful, arcane symbols and Cyrillic writing (North is Russian—this movie was from the halcyon days between the end of the Cold War and its horrific current genocidal landgrab attempts against Ukraine), and displays tiny points of light all over it.

Tooth, explaining the globe to Jack, says, “Each of those lights is a child.” North explains further, “A child who believes.” But some of the dots are bigger and others brighter. It’s unclear what information those variables are meant to convey. Older kids? Degree of belief? Relative niceness? We don’t see anyone looking into individual dots, which, if that’s not possible, really means that this device, diegetically, just shows where the Guardians might want to focus their activities, conspicuously, to bolster Belief in that geographical area.

And belief seems to be at critical levels. I asked chatGPT to count the dots in the second image in the gallery above. It estimated 39,674 dots and that that pictured chunk of South America to be about 12% of the world’s total landmass, excluding Antarctica. South America has around 5% of the world’s total population, which extrapolates out to a total 725,280 dots we would expect to see across the world. According to populationpyramid.com, global population in 2012—the time this film was released—was 7.2 billion, with 1.91 billion being 14 years old or younger (a generous age for childlike belief, since the average age of losing faith in a “real” Santa tends to be around 10 years old in the USA, but let’s run with it.)

I am delighted that this happens to look like a morbid, morbid Christmas tree.

That means that in the world of the Guardians, only 4 out of 100 children believe in any of them to begin with, even before Pitch comes a-calling. This would have been so easy to fix in the script. Have Tooth say, “These lights represent children who believe.” The plural would have left it ambiguous.

But I’ve digressed.

North has a viewing deck which seems custom-built for observing the globe, and which gives us an important perspective for analysis.

This over-the-yeti-shoulder shot helps point out a major failing of this display: visibility of the information.

With the globe anchored in place at the poles and the observation deck so low, this makes the dots in the southern hemisphere much more prominent in the viewers’ sight, introducing an availability bias. It looks like anything above 50N latitude is just…out of sight, and that includes significant populations in Europe as well as North’s own fortress. (We’ll see in the Control Panel that there’s a miniature globe mounted there that provides a view of the Northern Hemisphere, but we don’t see lights on it, and it would be a bad idea to split the information across two sources of differing scales, anyway. So let’s hope that’s not its intended purpose.)

There is an easy fix for the orientation problem, and it of course comes from the world of globe-making. By attaching the poles of the globe to a full meridian that encircles the globe, and then attaching the full meridian to a half meridian at the equator, you create a gimbal that allows the globe to rotate to any orientation.

Like this. Example from UltimateGlobes.com

This is called a full-swing mount, and it would allow arbitrary inspection of any point on the globe. It would be lovely to see writ large and mechanical in the film.

This display also privileges land in a possibly-misleading way, in the same way that election maps can. Let’s all recall that land doesn’t vote, but this kind of implies otherwise.

Same image as above, repeated for easy reference.

For example, on the Belief Globe, it looks like Australian kids are way behind in Belief metrics than New Zealand kids, but Australia has a density of 3.4 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to New Zealand’s 19.1, and this map doesn’t make that easy to understand. Proportion of per capita belief would be a better metric for delivering actionable Santa insight.

Like this, but inverse. From Colin Mathers on Medium.

Even better would be to show change in belief over time (“боже мой!” North might shout, “Bunny! Get to Czech Republic, немедленно!”), though information over time is notoriously difficult to do on a geographical map.

But even if we solve the orientation and representation problems, putting the information on a globe means at least half of it is out of sight at any given time. In the yeticam view above, what’s going on in Bermuda? You don’t know! It does revolve slowly, but by my own rough estimation at the speed we see in this scene, it would take around 6 minutes for this globe to make a complete, sidereal rotation, which is way, way beyond the vigilance threshold limit required to put that picture together holistically in your mind. If the whole picture is important (and I’m asserting that it is), the information display should be a map rather than a globe.

Eh…it’s a crappy Midjourney comp, but you get the gist.

You don’t want to lose the charming magical-Soviet machine feeling of it, but with a world map, maybe you have some mechanics that physically simulate the day/night cycle? And since the Man in the Moon is so important to this story, maybe the lunar cycle as well? Or you could make some mechanical interactive fisheye focus effect, which would be even more spectacular. (Please, somebody, do this.)

I also have to note that having Belief hold such a prominent place in this command and control room seems really self-serving. That much real estate is dedicated to telling you how much gas you have in the tank? There are plenty of additional things that a Santa and his team would want to keep track of that would be of as much importance: Days until Christmas, location of kids at risk of losing belief, percentage of toys complete, bowl-full-of-jelly BMI score, naughty/nice balance in the world, current value of elf pension fund, just to name a few. These could be split-flap displays for nostalgia and lovely clacking audio opportunities.

Globe Control Panel

On the observation deck, North has a control panel of sorts. There are two parts whose functions we can infer, a trackball and a ~~Bat-~~Guardian-Signal, but most of it—like the levers and joysticks with lit toggle buttons—we cannot. Let’s look at the two whose purpose we can infer.

The trackball

The trackball is a miniature Belief Globe, inset on the right hand of the control panel. It is quite similar to the trackballs we see in Arthur Christmas (2011, the year before) and The Christmas Chronicles (2018, six years later). If it controls the orientation of the Belief Globe, and its movement is constrained similarly to how the globe is, a user hoping to focus on Mauritius would have to memorize that it is due south of Oman, and do the same for the entirety of the southern hemisphere.

I hope you‘ve memorized your world geography, mate.

It should also be constrained to left-right movement like the thing being controlled, as if on a hidden inclination mount. But this looks like a free-spin trackball, so could use a knob in the pole and maybe a meridian arm to help signal its constraint. It should also be well-mapped to the globe as the observer sees it. It is not. Compare the orientation of the Globe to the trackball in the screen shot. They do not match.

All told, a pretty underthought component.

Bat-Guardian-Signal

Early in the film, when North realizes Pitch is back, he grabs the control in the far lower-right-hand corner. He twists it 90 degrees counterclockwise and pushes down. The ice-like octagonal button below begins to glow brightly.

This sets the Belief Globe to glowing with aurora lights, that extend out across the globe and alert the Guardians, signaling them to report to ~~Commissioner Gordon~~ North’s compound at once. Mentioned here only out of a sense of completeness, this control is germane to North’s being leader of a team rather than any of his Santa duties. It’s unlabeled, it can’t possibly have the global reach that it needs, and I’m not sure why the Globe was selected to be the source of the aurora, but meh, it’s just not that important in this context.

Final score: Lump of Coal

We have to keep in mind this is a movie for kids, and kids won’t be put off by any of these interface failings. But for our overthinking design-nerd purposes in reviewing the Santa tech, these just don’t hold up. Because of this, Rise of the Guardian’s Santa tech poses zero threat to dethroning The Santa Chronicle’s lovely Santa interfaces. But good to remind ourselves of the principles to which we should be paying attention.

Enjoy the movie for the fun voice acting, the awesome character design, the gorgeous Sandman visuals, and any nearby kids’ sense of wonder, but don’t worry about the interfaces as anything to admire or mimic in the real world.

Also screw this one homophobic elf. Violence is not an acceptable response to cheek kissing, especially in a country like Russia where that is the norm, and *especially*-especially in a movie catering to children.

Happy holidays, however you celebrate, to most everyone except you, asshole elf.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446192/

Hellraiser (2022)

30 Oct 2023 by Christopher Noessel

Hey readers. It’s been a while. There are reasons, but let’s move on.

Some Halloween years ago, I made a shout out on social media for examples of interfaces in horror movies. (Other than The Cabin in the Woods and Ghostbusters, that is, since I’ve already reviewed those.) I like Halloween and it seems like a way to celebrate the season, even as it takes us out of the stricter realm of sci-fi.

There weren’t a lot of candidates.

There were horror films, even classic ones, with some technology in it. Androids here, high-tech weapons and torture devices there. But very, very few interfaces. Horror-interfaces are kind of rare for perhaps the reason that sex-interfaces are relatively rare—i.e., the core vibe conflicts. But a friend mentioned Hellraiser and its evil Rubik’s Cubes (called Lament Configuration Boxes in the wikis) and I thought yeah, that’s an intriguing interface.

So I looked it up and, holy wow, there are a lot of Hellraisers. I had no idea. The franchise has 11 films, two novels, and more than 100 comic books. Like Star Wars or Star Trek or Doctor Who, there is enough that a very thorough review of it all might take the better part of the year. Fortunately, the franchise was “rebooted” in 2022 with a new film, which conveniently lets me just focus on that one.

If you’re only into sci-fi interfaces for the sci-fi, or don’t like descriptions of horror, skip this one, and come back to reviews by Hugh Fisher of 3D file browsers, which will be coming up next.

Plot

Riley’s new boyfriend Trevor is a bad influence. She’s 6 months sober and trying to get her life in order, but he not only convinces her to help him rob a shipping container at his job, but also to get drunk for courage. Instead of riches, in the shipping container they find only a strange, intricate, hand-sized metal puzzle box. They take it.

When Riley returns home, her brother Matt confronts her drunkenness and kicks her out. She goes to a nearby park, and begins fiddling with the box: looking at the patterns, turning its components, and feeling the textures.

She inserts a finger into a hole on the side and hears a snap as it pops open.

Is anyone else flashing back to *Flash Gordon* (1980) and the wood beast scene?

She turns it a few times and snaps it back together only to see a nasty looking curved knife spring out from the interior, nearly cutting her.

One of a group of demons with hideous body-horror modifications—the captions assure me she is called “The Gasp”—appears and tells her that “that blade was meant for you.” It demands she sacrifice herself or offer another in her stead, but Riley passes out.

Victim 1: Matt

Matt wakes up from a nightmare and leaves the apartment to find Riley. He does, but in moving her away from the park, accidentally stabs himself with the puzzle box blade. He heads into a public restroom to tend the wound, but the room transforms into a portal to Cenobite land, sealing his fate. Outside the box absorbs Matt’s blood, the blade retracts back inside, and its parts move of their own accord to a new configuration. She rushes into the bathroom to find Matt missing.

Bye, Matt, your only crime was in caring toooo muuuuuuucccch.

Victim 2: Serena

She takes the box to Trevor, where she insists they find who owns the shipping container to figure out more about the box. They somehow discover (it happens off screen) that the owner of the warehouse is Serena Manaker and that she is in a nearby infirmary. They visit her, where she tells them the box belonged to billionaire Roland Voight. Serena tries to take the box from Riley and in their struggle, parts are moved and Serena gets stabbed with the blade. Riley and Trevor leave with the box, and Serena Ceno-bites the dust. (

Riley hops online and searches for more about Voight. She learns that, like Matt, he interacted with the box and disappeared. Riley heads to Voight’s overgrown estate where the main gate mysteriously opens for her. She sneaks into the mansion to find Voight’s papers which describe the box, its configurations, and the Cenobites. She also finds his journal in which she reads that he was trying to use the box to get an “audience with god.” Following a whisper, she has a vision of Matt that is disturbed when Trevor, Matt’s boyfriend Colin, and their roomate Nora arrive at the mansion.

How Voight came by this information is anyone’s guess, but let’s face it, it’s probably chatGPT.

She reads to them from the journal, that with each new victim the box reconfigures itself and whoever “possesses the final [sixth] configuration is granted a passage to another realm to an audience with god” and that this god “offers choices to whoever holds [it].” Riley wonders if she could use “resurrection” to bring Matt back. The box, however, is missing.

Victim 3: Nora

Nora gets separated from the others and is stabbed in the back with the blade from the box by a mysterious figure. They load her in the van to get her to safety, but Cenobites appear inside the van, and take her. The remaining survivors crash the van and head back to the mansion.

Victim 4, but it’s really just a forcing function: Riley

Outside the mansion Riley has a conversation with Pinhead and gets stabbed with the box blade. Pinhead explains they now can take her, if she does not offer other victims.

Victim 4: a Chatterer

Other Cenobites appear and threaten them, but Riley stabs one of the demons (the wiki describes it as a “Chatterer”) with the blade, who is quickly yanked apart by hooked chains.

“But I never thought pinhead would eat my face!” sobs Cenobite who voted for the Pinhead Eating People’s Faces Party.

Riley, Trevor, and Colin retreat to the mansion, where Riley hits a switch and gates drop, protecting/trapping them inside. Inside who should appear from the shadows but Voight, who was not dead after all, but the mysterious figure from before, strapped with a Cenobite torture device I’d rather not describe. We learn he had hired Trevor to find victims so he could ascend and undo the torture device.

Victim 5: Colin

Hoping to use the box against more demons, Riley lures one of the Cenobites inside where it gets trapped in a gate, but in running from it, Riley drops the box. Voight appears, having recovered it, and stabs Colin. Then he gets to monologuing and explains that he’d successfully worked the box six years earlier and chosen “sensation,” and that resulted in his being outfitted with the wearable torture device. Having had Colin marked as its fifth victim, a massive shape appears out of the sky above the mansion, looking like a giant version of the box in its current, sixth, configuration (the wiki informs me this massive shape is called Leviathan).

Confusingly, this configuration is *also* called the Leviathan configuration of the box.

Victim 5, re-do: Trevor

As Voight talks with Pinhead in the central chamber below Leviathan, Riley sneaks in and grabs the box. She flips a switch and opens the gates, exposing Voight to the demons. Elsewhere in the mansion, she confronts The Gasp who is just on the verge of destroying Colin. Saying she chooses another victim, Riley uses the tip of the box to stab Trevor, who is schlorped into Cenobite-land.

Back in the central chamber, the torture device falls from Voight and his tissues painfully stitch themselves back together, only to have a hook-chain from the Leviathan drag him up and out of the mansion.

Voight is hoisted up by fleshhooks toward the skylight of his ballroom.

Riley faces the demons one last time, who try to tempt her with resurrecting her brother, but she’s learned her lesson. She knows Matt is gone and Cenobite gifts are always betrayals. They note that she’s chosen to live with the pain she’s caused and “the lament configuration,” and restore the box to its original shape. Riley and Colin limp from the mansion, leaving the box behind.

The final scene involves more body horror as Voight, in Cenobite-hell, is transformed into a hideous Cenobite himself.

Analysis of the box

For a while, I was having trouble finding a good anchor for analysis. What is the user’s goal here? How does a puncturing blade fit in? Should we add safety features to minimize the risk of the user’s getting hurt? But then I realized—hang on, our human victims are merely the incidental users. They certainly don’t put it out into the world for any reason. The description on Hulu says the box is used to “summon Cenobites” but honestly, that’s no protagonists’ goal.

A figure with a spiked mask sits in a small boat, fishing on a misty lake surrounded by tall grass. — Fish for the souls of the innocent to inflict with unthinkable body horrors, or cut bait.

Once you reframe it, and understand that it is designed against the humans and for the Cenobites, it suddenly falls into place. (You know, like social media. Or, say, American healthcare.) Cenobites are the users here. The box is a fishing lure, meant only to bob on the surface between worlds and attract victims. Unlike the most common horror movie trope, Hellraiser victims aren’t punished for transgressing some social norm. It’s literally not personal, victim. You were just the unlucky one sucked in by the lure.

The proximate lure

And it’s an effective lure for all sorts of human-psychology reasons: inviting materials, textures, affordances, and even appealing to cognitive closure. Let’s discuss each.

Inviting materials (see me)

In the first place, it’s shiny, likely to catch any available light and reflect it to catch attention, but also hinting that it is valuable. I have a suspicion that this is an evolutionary adaptation for finding water (it sparkles in relation to the sun) and quickly identifying animal faces (wet eyes reflecting light) that could be predators to avoid or prey to be hunted. My amateur suspicions aside, evolution is rather tight-lipped about its reasons. Shiny = interesting, and we have to move on from there.

Inviting textures (touch me)

Years ago while reading stuff about the questionable demimonde of Pick-Up Artists, I learned about “kino” which are worn textures that invite touching. Think ostrich feather plumes in hats, or feather boas, or fake fur lapels. Well, this box has it, too. The lines and patterns across its surface have kino in that they invite handling and touching because they look embossed and debossed. Riley’s first interaction with the box really emphasizes this. She doesn’t just turn it, like one might a Rubik’s Cube with its flat colors. No, she feels it.

In hindsight, I probably should have gotten a sponsorship for this post from Rubik’s.

Inviting affordances (manipulate me)

Seminal-and-problematic grandfather of UX Don Norman defined “affordances” back in his “The Design of Everyday Things.” The box is loaded with them.

It’s hand-sized, so it invites grabbing and holding.
The shape has several details that invite manipulation. For example, the raised wedges on the primary disc imply that the disc spins and even that it is meant to be spun clockwise.
The hole in the side invites a poke with a finger (or for the more leery, a stick.)
The lines across the corners imply that they can spin around a corner-to-corner axis.

All of these physical things invite a person not just to touch, but to manipulate.

Riley rotates a corner of the Lamentation Configuration.

There’s even a bit of semiotics involved because though this movie exists in a world where the Hellraiser films don’t exist (or all the main characters are wildly ignorant of them) but they presumably do exist in a world where Rubik’s Cube and its hundreds of spin-off and copycat toys do. You know what to do with this puzzle cube because you’ve seen and played with puzzle cubes before.

Cognitive Closure (complete me)

There’s even a bit of psychological allure in that the patterns across the surfaces don’t quite match up, and given the physical affordances discussed above, humans can barely help but to pick the thing up and see if they can set it “right.” The mismatched patterns invite further interaction. With apologies to OCD readers, here are some examples that tug at our psychological desire for closure.

Yes yes torn apart by hell hooks, but I want the circles to be *circles*.

The point of the hook

All of these things attract and invite manipulation in various ways, until the shape (mostly) ensures that a hand is in the right place to be stabbed by the little blade and—via the collection of blood—reeled in by the extreme body modification posse. This blade is hidden, as it should be, less the victim get scared off by the threat of a puncture wound or laceration. The fact that the seam through which it appears and disappears looks like many other seams on the surface of the box is perfect. It does not telegraph its danger. Unlike aposematics, this is deliberate deception, perfect for the fishing-lure nature of the box.

What the hell? That was *not* in the YouTube unboxing.

Anything missing?

There are lots of ways we could imagine that the box could lure people toward it, but there are two major and one minor constraints. The first major constraint is extradiegetic—that this is in a movie, so any other aspect of the lure should be visual or audible. Sure, it could emanate a localized sense of warmth and comfort, but it would need to be conveyed to audiences by a line of dialogue or two, and wouldn’t be as immediate. Visible or audible is best.

Secondly and diegetically, it needs to avoid scaring the potential fish, so it shouldn’t demonstrate uncanny behaviors, like whispering the victim’s name or being blurry in their vision. It should keep the user in a design stance in the Daniel Dennett sense, rather than the much scarier intentional stance embodied by humans and animals. In a design stance, the person is trying to understand how the designer intended a thing to be used, which encourages investigation and manipulation. It is generally less fraught and as such, more approachable.

The philosophy. You opened it. We came. Now you must come with us.

The minor constraint is the pressures by the studio for franchising and memetics. You could imagine that a better lure might be a $100 bill on the sidewalk. Victim can’t help but grab that sweet free-meal coupon, and gets poked by a spike coming out of Ben’s nose or something. Or maybe a fuzzy kitty who looks like it had a thorn in its poor little paw. Surprise, its fuzzy belly is a bear trap. But mimicking real-world objects wouldn’t result in a concrete novum that would look cool in posters and be instantly recognizable to audiences. The little puzzle box does that.

So between these constraints—the need to be cinegenic, memetic, and apparently-harmless, I’d say there is little that can be added to increase the lure-ness of the lure. Maybe adjust the mechanical sounds that occur with each twist to provide a sense of getting closer to a goal, encouragement to continue? The semiotics of that might be tough, but would fit the constraints. And still that suggestion feels small.

While I’m thinking about it, compare freely:

A lure that does demonstrate an intentional stance—Under the Skin (2013). (Sci-fi horror.)
A lure that demonstrates the uncanniness, but still “works”—Mimic (1997). (Not sci-fi but horror.)

The ultimate lure

But all that is just the first layer, i.e. the thing that might get an unknowing victim to “bite,” and get hooked on the blade. We learn over the course of this movie that there is another level here that proves to the ambitious psychopath even more tempting than a Rubik’s Cube, and that’s the possibility of having otherworldly gifts bestowed upon you: Life, knowledge, love, sensation, power, resurrection, or the hubristic possibility of an audience with (a) god. All you have to do is not care about the lives that you sacrifice to get there, and, being a billionaire, Voight is right on top of that.

All of them, we learn, are tainted offerings, but hey, it wouldn’t be hubris if you were a skeptical, thinking person.

From the fisher’s perspective, it’s a brilliant lure that tricks fish into bringing you other fish.

If this were a just diegesis, built around horror movie tropes similar to morality plays, we would hope that anyone pursuing the god path would merit real punishment. Voight knew what he was doing and still did it anyway. Other victims of the lure, like the fish in our extended metaphor, were just being themselves, responding to signals in their environment. It’s only Voight who has really transgressed here, heartlessly and horribly sacrificing people to hellish suffering, all as a stepping stone to his ambitions.

In some other alternate universe version of this movie, when Cenobites finally reeled in the psychopaths, the relatively innocent victims sacrificed along the way would be set free and the memory of their suffering erased to spare them the trauma. But no, like fishing, it’s just random destruction of some unlucky victim whose crime was being at the wrong place at the wrong time and being alive. True horror. Bon appetit.

Which brings us to our report card.

Report Card

Sci: B (3 out of 4) How believable are the interfaces? (To keep you immersed.)

Novae don’t depend on their imagine-ers solving the actual engineering required to make them a reality. We just accept laser swords and faster-than-light travel, and focus on consequences and the stories that unfold around them. So a mechanical puzzle box that occasionally pops up a blade that summons interdimensional pain demons? Sure, why not?

Still, I’m a little bothered by the seeming impossibility of its growing up to four times its original size with about the same mass and internal workings. Sure, sure, it’s probably a healthy dose of handwavium—and we’re treating horror like it was sci-fi—but for that inexplicable bit of the speculative technology, it gets dinged to a B.

Fi: A (4 out of 4) How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story? (To tell a good story.)

The franchise is enabled by this little box, both as a Macguffin, but also to set and raise the stakes. It structures the narrative. And, as mentioned in the intro, it’s a huge franchise with broad awareness. It’s popular enough to be spoofed in other shows. (Here I’m thinking Rick and Morty, but surely there are others.) If you showed one of these props at a Halloween party, I’d bet the majority of the attendees would recognize it and know where it’s from.

Jerry amuses the Hell Demons with his lameness. “Amortycan Grickfitti,” *Rick and Morty*: Season 5, Episode 5.

Interfaces: A (4 out of 4) How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals? (To be a good model for real-world design?)

Once you accept that the design is not for the human protagonists, but a lure for Cenobites fishing, it becomes very clear that the design of this device performs its functions almost perfectly. Not just catching one fish, but encouraging the worst of fish to betray other fishes to get reeled in. If you’re a cenobite, this is *chef’s hell-hooked kiss.*

And that’s it for HorrorTech 2023. If you know of a horror interface that you’d like to see analyzed sometime, drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, Happy Halloween, and stay safe out there.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887261/Currently streaming on:

8 Reasons The Voight-Kampff Machine is shit (and a redesign to fix it)

10 Dec 2019 by Christopher Noessel

Distinguishing replicants from humans is a tricky business. Since they are indistinguishable biologically, it requires an empathy test, during which the subject hears empathy-eliciting scenarios and watched carefully for telltale signs such as, “capillary dilation—the so-called blush response…fluctuation of the pupil…involuntary dilation of the iris.” To aid the blade runner in this examination, they use a portable machine called the Voight-Kampff machine, named, presumably, for its inventors.

The device is the size of a thick laptop computer, and rests flat on the table between the blade runner and subject. When the blade runner prepares the machine for the test, they turn it on, and a small adjustable armature rises from the machine, the end of which is an intricate piece of hardware, housing a powerful camera, glowing red.

The blade runner trains this camera on one of the subject’s eyes. Then, while reading from the playbook book of scenarios, they keep watch on a large monitor, which shows an magnified image of the subject’s eye. (Ostensibly, anyway. More on this below.) A small bellows on the subject’s side of the machine raises and lowers. On the blade runner’s side of the machine, a row of lights reflect the volume of the subject’s speech. Three square, white buttons sit to the right of the main monitor. In Leon’s test we see Holden press the leftmost of the three, and the iris in the monitor becomes brighter, illuminated from some unseen light source. The purpose of the other two square buttons is unknown. Two smaller monochrome monitors sit to the left of the main monitor, showing moving but otherwise inscrutable forms of information.

In theory, the system allows the blade runner to more easily watch for the minute telltale changes in the eye and blush response, while keeping a comfortable social distance from the subject. Substandard responses reveal a lack of empathy and thereby a high probability that the subject is a replicant. Simple! But on review, it’s shit. I know this is going to upset fans, so let me enumerate the reasons, and then propose a better solution.

-2. Wouldn’t a genetic test make more sense?

If the replicants are genetically engineered for short lives, wouldn’t a genetic test make more sense? Take a drop of blood and look for markers of incredibly short telomeres or something.

-1. Wouldn’t an fMRI make more sense?

An fMRI would reveal empathic responses in the inferior frontal gyrus, or cognitive responses in the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus. (The brain structures responsible for these responses.) Certinaly more expensive, but more certain.

0. Wouldn’t a metal detector make more sense?

If you are testing employees to detect which ones are the murdery ones and which ones aren’t, you might want to test whether they are bringing a tool of murder with them. Because once they’re found out, they might want to murder you. This scene should be rewritten such that Leon leaps across the desk and strangles Holden, IMHO. It would make him, and other blade runners, seem much more feral and unpredictable.

(OK, those aren’t interface issues but seriously wtf. Onward.)

1. Labels, people

Controls needs labels. Especially when the buttons have no natural affordance and the costs of experimentation to discover the function are high. Remembering the functions of unlabeled controls adds to the cognitive load for a user who should be focusing on the person across the table. At least an illuminated button helps signal the state, so that, at least, is something.

2. It should be less intimidating

The physical design is quite intimidating: The way it puts a barrier in between the blade runner and subject. The fact that all the displays point away from the subject. The weird intricacy of the camera, its ominous HAL-like red glow. Regular readers may note that the eyepiece is red-on-black and pointy. That is to say, it is aposematic. That is to say, it looks evil. That is to say, intimidating.

I’m no emotion-scientist, but I’m pretty sure that if you’re testing for empathy, you don’t want to complicate things by introducing intimidation into the equation. Yes, yes, yes, the machine works by making the subject feel like they have to defend themselves from the accusations in the ethical dilemmas, but that stress should come from the content, not the machine.

2a. Holden should be less intimidating and not tip his hand

While we’re on this point, let me add that Holden should be less intimidating, too. When Holden tells Leon that a tortoise and a turtle are the same thing, (Narrator: They aren’t) he happens to glance down at the machine. At that moment, Leon says, “I’ve never seen a turtle,” a light shines on the pupil and the iris contracts. Holden sees this and then gets all “ok, replicant” and becomes hostile toward Leon.

In case it needs saying: If you are trying to tell whether the person across from you is a murderous replicant, and you suddenly think the answer is yes, you do not tip your hand and let them know what you know. Because they will no longer have a reason to hide their murderyness. Because they will murder you, and then escape, to murder again. That’s like, blade runner 101, HOLDEN.

3. It should display history

The glance moment points out another flaw in the interface. Holden happens to be looking down at the machine at that moment. If he wasn’t paying attention, he would have missed the signal. The machine needs to display the interview over time, and draw his attention to troublesome moments. That way, when his attention returns to the machine, he can see that something important happened, even if it’s not happening now, and tell at a glance what the thing was.

4. It should track the subject’s eyes

Holden asks Leon to stay very still. But people are bound to involuntarily move as their attention drifts to the content of the empathy dilemmas. Are we going to add noncompliance-guilt to the list of emotional complications? Use visual recognition algorithms and high-resolution cameras to just track the subject’s eyes no matter how they shift in their seat.

5. Really? A bellows?

The bellows doesn’t make much sense either. I don’t believe it could, at the distance it sits from the subject, help detect “capillary dilation” or “ophthalmological measurements”. But it’s certainly creepy and Terry Gilliam-esque. It adds to the pointless intimidation.

6. It should show the actual subject’s eye

The eye color that appears on the monitor (hazel) matches neither Leon’s (a striking blue) or Rachel’s (a rich brown). Hat tip to Typeset in the Future for this observation. His is a great review.

7. It should visualize things in ways that make it easy to detect differences in key measurements

Even if the inky, dancing black blob is meant to convey some sort of information, the shape is too organic for anyone to make meaningful readings from it. Like seriously, what is this meant to convey?

The spectrograph to the left looks a little more convincing, but it still requires the blade runner to do all the work of recognizing when things are out of expected ranges.

8. The machine should, you know, help them

The machine asks its blade runner to do a lot of work to use it. This is visual work and memory work and even work estimating when things are out of norms. But this is all something the machine could help them with. Fortunately, this is a tractable problem, using the mighty powers of logic and design.

Pupillary diameter

People are notoriously bad at estimating the sizes of things by sight. Computers, however, are good at it. Help the blade runner by providing a measurement of the thing they are watching for: pupillary diameter. (n.b. The script speaks of both iris constriction and pupillary diameter, but these are the same thing.) Keep it convincing and looking cool by having this be an overlay on the live video of the subject’s eye.

So now there’s some precision to work with. But as noted above, we don’t want to burden the user’s memory with having to remember stuff, and we don’t want them to just be glued to the screen, hoping they don’t miss something important. People are terrible at vigilance tasks. Computers are great at them. The machine should track and display the information from the whole session.

Note that the display illustrates radius, but displays diameter. That buys some efficiencies in the final interface.

Now, with the data-over-time, the user can glance to see what’s been happening and a precise comparison of that measurement over time. But, tracking in detail, we quickly run out of screen real estate. So let’s break the display into increments with differing scales.

There may be more useful increments, but microseconds and seconds feel pretty convincing, with the leftmost column compressing gradually over time to show everything from the beginning of the interview. Now the user has a whole picture to look at. But this still burdens them into noticing when these measurements are out of normal human ranges. So, let’s plot the threshold, and note when measurements fall outside of that. In this case, it feels right that replicants display less that normal pupillary dilation, so it’s a lower-boundary threshold. The interface should highlight when the measurement dips below this.

Blush

I think that covers everything for the pupillary diameter. The other measurement mentioned in the dialogue is capillary dilation of the face, or the “so-called blush response.” As we did for pupillary diameter, let’s also show a measurement of the subject’s skin temperature over time as a line chart. (You might think skin color is a more natural measurement, but for replicants with a darker skin tone than our two pasty examples Leon and Rachel, temperature via infrared is a more reliable metric.) For visual interest, let’s show thumbnails from the video. We can augment the image with degree-of-blush. Reduce the image to high contrast grayscale, use visual recognition to isolate the face, and then provide an overlay to the face that illustrates the degree of blush.

But again, we’re not just looking for blush changes. No, we’re looking for blush compared to human norms for the test. It would look different if we were looking for more blushing in our subject than humans, but since the replicants are less empathetic than humans, we would want to compare and highlight measurements below a threshold. In the thumbnails, the background can be colored to show the median for expected norms, to make comparisons to the face easy. (Shown in the drawing to the right, below.) If the face looks too pale compared to the norm, that’s an indication that we might be looking at a replicant. Or a psychopath.

So now we have solid displays that help the blade runner detect pupillary diameter and blush over time. But it’s not that any diameter changes or blushing is bad. The idea is to detect whether the subject has less of a reaction than norms to what the blade runner is saying. The display should be annotating what the blade runner has said at each moment in time. And since human psychology is a complex thing, it should also track video of the blade runner’s expressions as well, since, as we see above, not all blade runners are able to maintain a poker face. HOLDEN.

Anyway, we can use the same thumbnail display of the face, without augmentation. Below that we can display the waveform (because they look cool), and speech-to-text the words that are being spoken. To ensure that the blade runner’s administration of the text is not unduly influencing the results, let’s add an overlay to the ideal intonation targets. Despite evidence in the film, let’s presume Holden is a trained professional, and he does not stray from those targets, so let’s skip designing the highlight and recourse-for-infraction for now.

Finally, since they’re working from a structured script, we can provide a “chapter” marker at the bottom for easy reference later.

Now we can put it all together, and it looks like this. One last thing we can do to help the blade runner is to highlight when all the signals indicate replicant-ness at once. This signal can’t be too much, or replicants being tested would know from the light on the blade runner’s face when their jig is up, and try to flee. Or murder. HOLDEN.

For this comp, I added a gray overlay to the column where pupillary and blush responses both indicated trouble. A visual designer would find some more elegant treatment.

If we were redesigning this from scratch, we could specify a wide display to accomodate this width. But if we are trying to squeeze this display into the existing prop from the movie, here’s how we could do it.

Note the added labels for the white squares. I picked some labels that would make sense in the context. “Calibrate” and “record” should be obvious. The idea behind “mark” is an easy button for the blade runner to press when they see something that looks weird, like when doctors manually annotate cardiograph output.

Lying to Leon

There’s one more thing we can add to the machine that would help out, and that’s a display for the subject. Recall the machine is meant to test for replicant-ness, which happens to equate to murdery-ness. A positive result from the machine needs to be handled carefully so what happens to Holden in the movie doesn’t happen. I mentioned making the positive-overlay subtle above, but we can also make a placebo display on the subject’s side of the interface.

The visual hierarchy of this should make the subject feel like its purpose is to help them, but the real purpose is to make them think that everything’s fine. Given the script, I’d say a teleprompt of the empathy dilemma should take up the majority of this display. Oh, they think, this is to help me understand what’s being said, like a closed caption. Below the teleprompt, at a much smaller scale, a bar at the bottom is the real point.

On the left of this bar, a live waveform of the audio in the room helps the subject know that the machine is testing things live. In the middle, we can put one of those bouncy fuiget displays that clutters so many sci-fi interfaces. It’s there to be inscrutable, but convince the subject that the machine is really sophisticated. (Hey, a diegetic fuiget!) Lastly—and this is the important part—An area shows that everything is “within range.” This tells the subject that they can be at ease. This is good for the human subject, because they know they’re innocent. And if it’s a replicant subject, this false comfort protects the blade runner from sudden murder. This test might flicker or change occasionally to something ambiguous like “at range,” to convey that it is responding to real world input, but it would never change to something incriminating.

This way, once the blade runner has the data to confirm that the subject is a replicant, they can continue to the end of the module as if everything was normal, thank the replicant for their time, and let them leave the room believing they passed the test. Then the results can be sent to the precinct and authorizations returned so retirement can be planned with the added benefit of the element of surprise.

OK

Look, I’m sad about this, too. The Voight-Kampff machine is cool. It fits very well within the art direction of the Blade Runner universe. This coolness burned the machine into my memory when I saw this film the first dozen times, but despite that, it just doesn’t stand up to inspection. It’s not hopeless, but does need a lot of thinkwork and design to make it really fit to task, and convincing to us in the audience.

Restraining Order

2 Jan 2018 by Christopher Noessel

After Joe confronts Beth and she calls for help, Joe is taken to a police station where in addition to the block, he now has a GPS-informed restraining order against him.

To confirm the order, Joe has to sign is name to a paper and then press his thumbprints into rectangles along the bottom. The design of the form is well done, with a clearly indicated spot for his signature, and large touch areas in which he might place his thumbs for his thumbprints to be read.

A scary thing in the interface is that the text of what he’s signing is still appearing while he’s providing his thumbprints. Of course the page could be on a loop that erases and redisplays the text repeatedly for emphasis. But, if it was really downloading and displaying it for the first time to draw his attention, then he has provided his signature and thumbprints too early. He doesn’t yet know what he’s signing.

Government agencies work like this all the time and citizens comply because they have no choice. But ideally, if he tried to sign or place his thumbprints before seeing all the text of what he’s signing, it would be better for the interface to reject his signature with a note that he needs to finish reading the text before he can confirm he has read and understands it. Otherwise, if the data shows that he authenticated it before the text appeared, I’d say he had a pretty good case to challenge the order in court.

Video Phone Calls

1 Feb 2017 by scifihughf

The characters in Johnny Mnemonic make quite a few video phone calls throughout the film, enough to be grouped in their own section on interfaces.

The first thing a modern viewer will note is that only one of the phones resembles a current day handheld mobile. This looks very strange today and it’s hard to imagine why we would ever give up our beloved iPhones and Androids. I’ll just observe that accurately predicting the future is difficult (and not really the point) and move on.

More interesting is the variety of phones used. In films from the 1950s to the 1990s, everyone uses a desk phone with a handset. (For younger readers: that is the piece you picked up and held next to your ear and mouth. There’s probably one in your parents’ house.) The only changes were the gradual replacement of rotary dials by keypads, and some cordless handsets. In 21st century films everyone uses a small sleek handheld box. But in Johnny Mnemonic every phone call uses a different interface.

New Darwin

First is the phone call Johnny makes from the New Darwin hotel.

As previously discussed, Johnny is lying in bed using a remote control to select numbers on the onscreen keypad. He is facing a large wall mounted TV/display screen, with what looks like a camera at the top. The camera is realistic but unusual: as Chapter 10 of Make It So notes, films very rarely show the cameras used in visual communication.

Taxi

The second phone call takes place in Newark, as Johnny rides in a taxi from the airport. Since this is a moving vehicle rather than a room, it shows that wireless videophones also exist. We don’t see how the call is made, just the conversation. Johnny is looking at and speaking into a small screen in front of his seat.

Quick aside: The blue lines at the bottom of the screen are a street map, with the glowing dot being the taxi. While it’s not the focus of this particular interface, it’s interesting that this map seems to be fixed with the indicator moving sideways. Aircraft and now car navigators use a moving map with the indicator moving up for forward. But this is for the passenger rather than the driver so doesn’t need to be particularly useful. And it’s blue, so must be advanced.

At the other end is Ralphie, who is using a desk screen with a keyboard.

We get to see things from Ralphie’s end. His keyboard only has ten keys in two rows of five. Ralphie touches the middle key in the bottom row to end the call.

Is this a dedicated phone rather than a computer? The only full-sized keyboards we see in Johnny Mnemonic are part of systems implied to be outdated or salvaged. Perhaps by 2021 voice recognition is good enough to handle most input. Or perhaps by 2021 status indicators have changed and once again nobody who considers themselves important would have a QWERTY keyboard on their desk, leaving others to do the more “menial” typing.

Shinji’s mobile

There is a cyberspace sequence (discussed in a separate post) during which there is a conversation between a Pharmakom tracker and Shinji, the leader of the Yakuza searching for Johnny, who is in en route by car. Shinji’s phone seems to be just like a current day mobile, if perhaps a little smaller than we’re used to.

Takahashi’s desk phone

Takahashi, head of Pharmakom in Newark, has a desktop screen too. This is a general purpose computer which at various times displays video of his daughter and a corporate database entry about Anna, the Pharmakom founder.

There is no keyboard, but later we will see that the desk surface has hand gesture tracking capability. Here the screen displays an onscreen video phone window and numeric keypad, similar to what we saw in the New Darwin sequence, but Takahashi doesn’t use that interface. Instead he just says “Get me Karl” and the phone dials the recipient automatically.

Takahashi doesn’t prefix his command with a control phrase such as“Siri” or “Computer” which would imply that the computer is always listening. For an executive with a private office this would be reasonable: who else could he be addressing? A second possibility is that the computer does voice recognition and would not respond to commands from anyone else.

Street Preacher’s Phone

As before, the recipient has chosen to show a video splash screen on connection instead of a live video feed.

“Karl” is more commonly known as Street Preacher and works within a church of sorts. We don’t know whether this is genuine religion belief on his part or a cover operation. His phone system is built into a large book, which I thought was intended to be a Bible but Chris identifies as a 16th century ecclesiastical history. There are no controls visible, but we see Karl “pick up” by opening the book so perhaps he “hangs up” by closing it again. Otherwise it could be operated purely by voice.

Public phone

Earlier in the film, Johnny picked up an “Infobahn 3000” handset with built in phone keypad.

His next phone call is from a public phone booth. On screen we see the now familiar videophone keypad. (Apparently this time in cyan, although it’s a very minor color shift.). To the right of the screen are physical buttons, some of which are labelled “start” “stop” and “pause” so perhaps duplicate the onscreen controls. Johnny begins by borrowing Jane’s phone card and swiping it through the payment slot.

The red Infobahn handset is connected to Jane’s card by a cable, although we don’t see Johnny doing this. Johnny types on the handset keypad rather than using the onscreen controls, presumably doing some hacking through the interface.

At first sight it seems unlikely that the phone system could be hacked through an EFTPOS card reader. However there is a long and unhappy history of programmers leaving backdoors and unused functionality in products, often excused with “Well, nobody else knows about it”, which are then exploited. Payment cards themselves often have embedded integrated circuits. This particular hack is not completely implausible.

When the Pharmakom splash screen appears, Johnny types again on the handset. He is manipulating the internal company phone system to gain access to a number that normally would not be available to the public.

The new number connects Johnny to a surprised corporate type who wants to know how Johnny got through.

We’ll learn later on that this gentleman is not at all who he seems to be. For now, note that Johnny talks and listens directly to the screen and speakers in the phone booth, not the handset he is holding.

Spider phone

Just before his brain is scanned by Spider, Johnny tries to make another call. This time he uses a typical 1990s computer CRT display and keyboard. He wears a conventional looking earpiece and microphone, and there is a small camera mounted on top of the display. He types the number on the keyboard and reaches a Pharmakom receptionist, but Johnny is interrupted.

Van call

The last phone call is made by Johnny to Pharmakom again. This time he is in Spider’s van, which doesn’t have a built in phone like the taxi we saw earlier. He uses the handset for audio and a small portable screen for video. There must be a wireless transmitter and receiver somewhere, but it isn’t obvious.

Johnny doesn’t realise that he is actually talking to Takahashi, the head of Pharmakom, through a puppet avatar, which I’ll talk about in the next post.

3 of 3: Brain Hacking

25 Jan 2017 by scifihughf

The hospital doesn’t have the equipment to decrypt and download the actual data. But Jane knows that the LoTeks can, so they drive to the ruined bridge that is the LoTek home base. As mentioned earlier under Door Bombs and Safety Catches the bridge guards nearly kill them due to a poorly designed defensive system. Once again Johnny is not impressed by the people who are supposed to help him.

When Johnny has calmed down, he is introduced to Jones, the LoTek codebreaker who decrypts corporate video broadcasts. Jones is a cyborg dolphin.

Jones has not just an implant like Johnny or an augmented nervous system like Jane, but a full neural brain interface that gives him active control. The thing behind his eye and under the cable can rotate, and he can also direct and control an external microwave radar dish. In the background there are a lot of cables and blinking lights apparently connecting Jones to the LoTek video broadcast gear.

For his part, Johnny is sitting in a chair, upper head strapped into a helmet-like brain scanner. This one is very big and clunky, perhaps because it is salvaged old technology or perhaps because this is not just a passive scanner, so needs additional elements and power to actively modify the brain.

When this starts operating, we see the same strobing white light flashes that the first scanner used.

J-Bone, the LoTek leader, uses a handheld camera to feed the first access code image into the system. This is yet another piece of talking technology, announcing that the first image has been loaded.

The captured image is processed to remove the perspective keystoning, and displayed on one of three small panels on the wall, side by side. That specialised displays are made solely for displaying three images suggests that this form of access code is a standard method of data protection in 2021. The other two panels display rolling static.

Wait…static?

Why is there static in a 2021 system for displaying computer images? It’s not just because they’re analog: old CRT computer monitors went blank if there was nothing to display. This is a missing or scrambled signal.

Since the LoTeks rely on scavenged technology, it’s quite likely that they are the last people on the planet still using coax video cables. Another possibility is that this is a deliberate imitation, as we saw earlier with the digital fax machine that made analog sounds. Computer graphics programmers are constantly wondering whether the screen is black because they didn’t draw anything, or black because they accidently drew everything in that color. The rolling static makes it clear that there is no image to display, not that the image is blank.

The first download attempt is interrupted by the Yakuza attacking the bridge. There’s some equipment damage, but by the end of the fight Johnny and company have recovered the second access code image.

Still not enough, but Johnny now attempts to “hack his own brain” which is successful (discussed below). The data is finally downloaded and the LoTeks broadcast the cure for NAS worldwide.

Tech Tease

The hacking and downloading take place in another virtual reality space, the internal representation of the implant. These sequences are action-packed and filled with eye catching visuals. If we wanted, there’s much that could be written about, from the visual representations of hacking used in film and TV to the advisability of transmitting vital scientific data through a video encoder. But we never get to see the interface!

Instead, we see Johnny just sit and do nothing other than maintain a death grip on the chair armrests and try not to grind his teeth into fragments. According to the running commentary on the hack provided by J-Bone, Johnny is performing actions in VR. It’s possible that the LoTek brain scanner is a true brain interface that gives him active control by thought alone with no sound or audio experience.

But this is evidently high grade encryption, which could only be broken by an expert hacker. Without visible controls for the brain scanner, the expert hacker would need to be using a direct brain interface. And the hacker would naturally have their own avatar. The only person present who definitely meets all these requirements is not Johnny, but Jones.

Could Jones be really doing all the work? In the original short story it was Jones, and here he’s certainly doing something in virtual reality. Johnny would make a useful distraction, and J-Bone might deliberately mislead the non-LoTek bystanders to keep Jones a secret.

Whether it’s Johnny or Jones, we only get to see what happens, not how. Rather than end on this disappointing note, I’ll now jump back to discuss the more rewarding interfaces for phone calls and cyberspace search sequence.

Brain Upload

7 Dec 2016 by scifihughf

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.)

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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 Memory Doubler

23 Nov 2016 by scifihughf

In Beijing, Johnny steps into a hotel lift and pulls a small package out his pocket. He unwraps it to reveal the “Pemex MemDoubler”.

Johnny extends the cable from the device and plugs it into the implant in his head. The socket glows red once the connection is made.

Analysis: The jack

The jack looks like an audio plug, and like most audio plugs is round and has no coronal-orientation requirement. It also has a bulbous rather than pointed tip. Both of these are good design, as Johnny can’t see the socket directly and while accidentally poking yourself with a headphone style point is unlikely to be harmful, it would certainly be irritating.

The socket’s glow would be a useful indicator that the thing is working, but Johnny can’t see it! Probably these sockets and jacks are produced and used for other devices as well, as red status lights are common in this world.

There are easier and more convenient fictional brain plug interfaces, such as the neck plugs previously discussed on this website for Ghost In The Shell. But Johnny doesn’t want his implant to be too obvious, so this not so convenient plug may be a deliberate choice. Perhaps he tells inquisitive people that it’s for his Walkman.

Analysis: The device

The product name got a few chuckles from audiences in the 1990s, as the name is similar to a common classic Macintosh extension at the time, the Connectix RAM Doubler. This applied in-memory lossless data compression techniques to allow more or larger programs to run within the existing RAM.

The MemDoubler is apparently a software or firmware updater, modifying Johnny’s implant to use brain tissue twice as efficiently as before. It has voice output, again a slightly artificial sounding but not unpleasant voice. This announces that Johnny’s current capacity is 80 gigabytes. As the update is applied, a glowing progress bar gradually fills until the voice announces the new capacity of 160G.

(Going from 80G to 160G seems quaint today. But we should remember that the value of a mnemonic courier is secrecy, not quantity.)

Why does the MemDoubler need voice output? For such a simple task, the progress bar and a three digit numeric counter would seem adequate. But if there are complications—which for something wired into the brain might have an all too literal meaning for “fatal error”—a voice announcement would be able to include much more detail about the problem, or even alert bystanders if Johnny is rendered unconscious by the problem. (Given how current software installers operate, Johnny is fortunate that the MemDoubler did not insist on reciting the entire end user license agreement and warranty before the update could start.) Maybe the visual should be the default (to respect his professional need for secrecy), and the voice announcement adopted in an alert mode.

It’s also interesting that Johnny installs this immediately before he needs it, in the lift that is taking him to the hotel room where he will receive the data to be stored. Suppose someone else had been in the lift with him? In this world of routine body implants doubling your memory is probably not a crime, but at the time of writing diabetics will inject themselves in private even though that is harmless and necessary. Perhaps body-connected technology will be common enough in 2021 that public operation is considered normal, just as we have become accustomed to mobile phone conversations being carried out in public.

Hotel Remote

9 Nov 2016 by scifihughf

The Internet 2021 shot that begins the film ends in a hotel suite, where it wakes up lead character Johnny. This is where we see the first real interface in the film. It’s also where this discussion gets more complicated.

A note on my review strategy

As a 3D graphics enthusiast, I’d be happy just to analyze the cyberspace scenes, but when you write for Sci Fi Interfaces, there is a strict rule that every interface in a film must be subjected to inspection. And there are a lot of interfaces in Johnny Mnemonic. (Curse your exhaustive standards, Chris!)

A purely chronological approach which would spend too much time looking at trees and not enough at the forest. So I’ll be jumping back and forth a bit, starting with the gadgets and interfaces that appear only once, then moving on to the recurring elements, variations on a style or idea that are repeated during the film.

Description

The wakeup call arrives in the hotel room as a voice announcement—a sensible if obvious choice for someone who is asleep—and also as text on a wall screen, giving the date, time, and temperature. The voice is artificial sounding but pleasant rather than grating, letting you know that it’s a computer and not some hotel employee who let himself in. The wall display functions as both a passive television and an interactive computer monitor. Johnny picks up a small remote control to silence the wake up call.

This remote is a small black box like most current-day equivalents, but with a glowing red light at one end. At the time of writing blue lights and indicators are popular for consumer electronics, apparently following the preference set by science fiction films and noted in Make It So. Johnny Mnemonic is an outlier in using red lights, as we’ll see more of these as the film progresses. Here the glow might be some kind of infrared or laser beam that sends a signal, or it might simply indicate the right way to orient the control in the hand for the controls to make sense.

First thing every morning: Messages

After silencing the alarm, Johnny, like so many of us today, checks his email. (In 1995 doing so before even getting out of bed might have been intended to show his detachment from humanity. Today, it seems perfectly natural!) He uses the remote to switch the display to the hotel “Message Centre”. We see his thumb move around, so the remote must have multiple buttons, but can’t tell whether this is a simple arrow keypad or something more complicated.

The message centre of the New Darwin Inn system both displays the text message visually and also speaks it aloud in the same synthesized voice that woke him up. Voiceovers are common in films so the audience doesn’t have to try to read the cinema screen, but in this case it would be genuinely useful. Guests could start doing something else without needing to pay full attention to the display.

Is it necessary for Johnny to explicitly switch to the Message Center? The system could have displayed this message automatically after the wakeup call, or shown the 2021 equivalent of his InBox. On the other hand, this is a giant, clearly visible screen and Johnny was not alone in the suite. Johnny, and other guests, might wish to keep their communications private.

As Johnny has no messages, he uses the remote to switch the display to a TV channel.

The hotel room “phone” call

Next he uses the remote to make a phone call. He starts by using the remote to dial the number, which appears on the display. We can’t see whether he is typing numbers directly, or using arrow keys and an Enter or OK button to navigate around the onscreen keypad. It’s certainly convenient for guests to be able to make a call without getting out of bed, but a voice recognition interface might be even easier. We’ll see a phone system that accepts voice commands later on, so perhaps using the remote is just a preference.

What is the strange blue window to the right of the keypad? It’s there because all phone calls in 2021 are in fact video calls. The equivalent to a busy waiting tone in this world is a video splash screen. These can be customized by the recipient, here showing the company name, Dataflow.

And finally both parties can see and hear each other. Note also the graphical reverse, stop, and play buttons at the bottom right of the keypad. These imply some sort of recording capability, but we never see them used.

I’ll discuss the 2021 phone system in more detail later on, so for now we just need to know that this phone call is the setup that sends Johnny to Beijing for his next, and hopefully last, job.

Jefferson Projection

18 Jan 2016 by Christopher Noessel

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.