Tag Archives: Jasper’s house

Jasper’s Music Player

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After Jasper tells a white lie to Theo, Miriam, and Kee to get them to escape the advancing gang of Fishes, he returns indoors. To set a mood, he picks up a remote control and presses a button on it while pointing it at a display.

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He watches a small transparent square that rests atop some things in a nook. (It’s that decimeter-square, purplish thing on the left of the image, just under the lampshade.) The display initially shows an album queue, with thumbnails of the album covers and two bright words, unreadably small. In response to his button press, the thumbnail for Franco Battiato’s album FLEURs slides from the right to the left. A full song list for the album appears beneath the thumbnail. Then track two, the cover of Ruby Tuesday, begins to play. A small thumbnail to the right of the album cover appears, featuring some white text on a dark background and a cycling, animated border. Theo puts the remote control down, picks up the Quietus box, and walks over to Janice. *sniff*

This small bit of speculative consumer electronics gets around 17 seconds of screen time, but we see enough to consider the design. 

Persistent display

One very nice thing about it is that it is persistently visible. As Marshall McLuhan famously noted, we are simply not equipped with earlids. This means that when music is playing in a space, you can’t really just turn away from it to stop listening. You’ll still hear it. In UX parlance, sound is non-modal.

Yet with digital music players, the visual displays that tell you about what’s being played, or the related interfaces that help you know what you can do with the music are often hidden behind modes. Want to know what that song you can’t stop hearing is? Find your device, wake it up, enter a password, find the app, and even then you may have to root around to find the software to find what you’re looking for.

But a persistent object means that non-modal sound is accompanied by (mostly) non-modal visuals. This little box is always somewhere, glowing, and telling you what’s playing, what just played, and what’s next.

Remote control

Finding the remote is a different problem, of course, and if your household is like my household, it is a thing which seems to want to be lost. To keep that non-modality of sound matched by the controls, it would be better to have the device or the environment know when Jasper is looking at the display, and enable loose gestural or voice controls to control it.

Imagine the scene if he grabs the Quietus box, looks up to the display, and says, “Play…” then pause while he considers his options, and says “…‘Ruby Tuesday’…the Battiato one.” We would have known that his selection has deep personal meaning. If Cuarón wanted to convey that this moment has been planned for a while, Jasper could even have said, “Play her goodbye song.”

Visual layout

The visual design of the display is, like most of the technology, meant to be a peripheral thing, accepting attention but not asking for it. In this sense it works. The text is so small the audience is not tempted to read it. The thumbnails are so small it is only if you already knew the music that it would refresh your memory. But if this was a real product meant to live in the home, I would redesign the display to be usable at the 3–6 meter distance, which would require vastly reducing the number of elements, increasing their size, and perhaps overlaying text on image.

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Jasper’s home alarm

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When Theo, Kee, and Miriam flee the murderous Fishes, they take refuge in Jasper’s home for the night. They are awoken in the morning by Jasper’s sentry system.

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A loud cacophonous alarm sounds, made up of what sounds like recorded dog barks, bells clanging, and someone banging a stick on a metal trash can lid. Jasper explains to everyone in the house that “It’s the alarm! Someone’s breaking in!”

They gather around a computer screen with large speakers on either side. The screen shows four video feeds labeled ROAD A, FOREST A, FRONT DOOR, and ROAD B. Labels reading MOTION DETECTED <> blink at the bottom of the ROAD A and ROAD B feeds, where we can see members of the Fishes removing the brush that hides the driveway to Jasper’s house.

The date overlays the upper right hand corner of the screen, 06-DEC-2027, 08:10:58.

Across the bottom is a control panel of white numbers and icons on red backgrounds.

  • A radio button control for the number of video feeds to be displayed. Though we are seeing the 4-up display, the icon does not appear to be different than the rest.
  • 16 enumerated icons, the purpose for which is unclear.
  • Video control icons for reverse, stop, play, and fast forward.
  • Three buttons with gray backgrounds and icons.
  • A wide button blinking MASTER ALARM

The scene cuts to Jasper’s rushing to the car outside the home, where none of the cacophony can be heard.

Similar to his car dashoard, it makes sense that Jasper has made this alarm himself. This might explain the clunky layout and somewhat inscrutable icons. (What do the numbers do? What about that flower on the gray background?)

The three jobs of an intruder alarm

Jasper’s alarm is OK. It certainly does the job of grabbing the household’s attention, which is the first job of an alarm, and does it without alerting the intruders, as we see in the shot outside the house.

It could do a bit better at the second job of an alarm, which is to inform the household of the nature of the problem. That they have to gather around the monitor takes precious time that could be used for making themselves safer. It could be improved by removing this requirement.

  • If Jasper had added more information to the audio alarm, even so basic as a prerecorded “Motion on the road! Motion on the road!” then they might not have needed to gather around the monitor at all.
  • If the relevant video feeds could be piped to wearable devices, phones, or their car, then they can fill in their understanding at the same time that they are taking steps to getting the hell out of there.
  • Having the artificial intelligence that we have in actual-world 2017 (much less speculative 2027), we know that narrow AI can process that video to have many more details in the broadcast message. “Motion on the road! I see three cars and at least a dozen armed men!”

There is arguably a third job of an advanced alarm, and this is to help the household understand the best course of action. This can be problematic when the confidence of the recommendation is low. But if the AI can confidently make a recommendation, it can use whatever actuators it has to help them along their way.

  • It could be informational, such as describing the best option. The audio alarm could encourage them to “Take the back road!” It could even alert the police (though in the world of Children of Men, Jasper would not trust them and they may be disinclined to care.)
  • The alarm could give some parameters and best-practice recommendations like, “You have 10 minutes to be in the car! Save only yourselves, carry nothing!”
  • It could keep updating the situation and the countdown so the household does not have to monitor it.
  • It can physically help as best it can, like remotely starting and positioning cars for them.

This can get conceptually tricky as the best course of action may be conditional, e.g. “If you can get to the car in 5 minutes, then escape is your best option, but if it takes longer or you have defenses, then securing the home and alerting the police is the better bet.” But that may be too much to process in the moment, and for a household that does not rehearse response scenarios, the simpler instruction may be safer.