Tag Archives: infrared

Night Vision Goggles

by

1

Genarro: “Are they heavy?”
Excited Kid: “Yeah!”
Genarro: “Then they’re expensive, put them back”
Excited Kid: [nope]

Screenshot-(248)

The Night Vision Goggles are large binoculars that are sized to fit on an adult head.  They are stored in a padded case in the Tour Jeep’s trunk.  When activated, a single red light illuminated in the “forehead” of the device, and four green lights appear on the rim of each lens. The green lights rotate around the lens as the user zooms the binoculars in and out. On a styling point, the goggles are painted in a very traditional and very adorable green and yellow striped dinosaur pattern.

Tim holds the goggles up as he plays with them, and it looks like they are too large for his head (although we don’t see him adjust the head support at all, so he might not have known they were adjustable).  He adjusts the zoom using two hidden controls—one on each side.  It isn’t obvious how these work. It could be that…

  • There are no controls, and it automatically focuses on the thing in the center of the view or on the thing moving.
  • One side zooms in, and the other zooms out.
  • Both controls have a zoom in/zoom out ability.
  • Each side control powers its own lens.
  • Admittedly, the last option is the least likely.

Unfortunately the movie just doesn’t give us enough information, leaving it as an exercise for us to consider.

Screenshot (241)

Dr. Grant, Timmy is hogging the tech

Note that there aren’t enough goggles in the Jeep for everyone.  During a tour this might set up a competition for the goggles.  Considering how much a ticket to the island is implied to cost, the passengers in the Jeep would likely be unhappy at this constraint.

Better here would be some kind of HUD for the entire Jeep, with a thermal overlay or night-vision projection of what’s around the Jeep.

Alternatively, if cost is indeed an issue to Hammond, the TV screen could be used to show camera feeds of the pen and dinosaurs inside.

Hopefully A Prototype

The lights on the front show what’s happening internally, and give feedback that the goggles are doing something to people watching.  As we learn soon after this scene, dinosaurs are also very sensitive to light and motion.  Especially the T-Rex.

These night vision goggles would work best in darkness, where it would add to the tour to see a dinosaur behaving (relatively) naturally.  If the dinosaurs on the tour are very sensitive to light, then the motion on the front of the goggles would actually be counter to the goals person using the goggles.

So let’s presume these were a prototype, and why they were in the trunk and not mentioned by Hammond at the start of the tour.

Overall

The goggles look easy to use, but appear to need refinement from field experience.  A key point will be how the passengers react to having enough of them, and whether they serve the tourists in experiencing the park as intended.

Scav dual-monoculars

by

1

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

scav_oculars_04

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

scavnolculars

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

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

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

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

Two views reduce the amount of information

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

Two views add work

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

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

scavnolculars_overlaid

The blur and low-contrast don’t help

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

Having one scaled makes it worse

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

scav_oculars_buildings

A more direct solution

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

scav_oculars_comp