After fleeing the Yakuza in the hotel, Johnny arrives in the Free City of Newark, and has to go through immigration control. This process appears to be entirely automated, starting with an electronic passport reader.
After that there is a security scanner, which is reminiscent of HAL from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Marty Sr. answers a call from a shady business colleague shortly after coming home. He takes the call in the den on the large video screen there. As he approaches the screen, he sees a crop of a Renoir painting, Dance at La Moulin de la Galette, with a blinking legend INCOMING CALL along the bottom. When he answers it, the Renoir shrinks to a corner of the screen, revealing the live video feed with his correspondent. During the conversation, the Renoir disappears, and text appears near the bottom of the screen providing reminders about the speaker. This appears automatically, with no prompting from Marty Sr.
Needles, Douglas J. Occupation: Sys Operations Age: 47 Birthday: August 6, 1968 Address: 88 Oriole Rd, A6t Wife: Lauren Anne Children: Roberta, 23 Amy, 20 Food Prefence: Steak, Mex Food Dislike: Fish, Tuna Drinks: Scotch, Beer Hobbies: Avid Basketball Fan Sports: Jogging, Slamball, Tennis Politics: None
This is an augmented reality teleconference, as mentioned in Chapter 8 of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction. See more information in that chapter. In short, it’s a particularly good example of one type of augmentation that is very useful for people having to interact with networks of people much larger than Dunbar’s number equips us for. Unfortunately, the information appears in a distracting scroll across the bottom, and is not particularly pertinent to the conversation, so could benefit from a bit of context awareness or static high-resolution display to be really useful.Continue reading →