The Thanatorium: A beneficiary’s experience

23 Aug 2022 by Christopher Noessel

The thanatorium is a speculative service for assisted suicide in Soylent Green. Suicide and death are not easy topics and I will do my best to address them seriously. Let me first take a moment to direct anyone who is considering or dealing with suicide to please stop reading this and talk to someone about it. I am unqualified to address—and this blog is not the place to work through—such issues.

There are four experiences to look at in the interface and service design of the Thanatorium: The patient, their beneficiaries, the usher, and the attendants to the patient. This post is about the least complicated of the bunch, the beneficiaries.

Thorn’s experience

We have to do a little extrapolation here because the way we see it in the movie is not the way we imagine it would work normally. What we see is Thorn entering the building and telling staff there to take him to Sol. He is escorted to an observation room labeled “beneficiaries only” by an usher. (Details about the powerful worldbuilding present in this label can be found in the prior post.) Sol has already drunk the “hemlock” drink by the time Thorn enters this room, so Sol is already dying and the robed room attendants have already left.

Aaand I just noticed that the walls are the same color as the Soylent. Ewww.

This room has a window view of the “theater” proper, with an interface mounted just below the window. At the top of this interface is a mounted microphone. Directly below is an intercom speaker beside a large status alert labeled SPEAKING PERMITTED. When we first see the panel this indicator is off. At the bottom is a plug for headphones to the left, a slot for a square authorization key, and in the middle, a row of square, backlit toggle buttons labeled PORTAL, EFFECTS, CHAMBER 2, AUDIO, VISUAL, and CHAMBER 1. When the Sol is mid-show, EFFECTS and VISUAL are the only buttons that are lit.

When the usher closes the viewing window, explaining that it’s against policy for beneficiaries to view the ceremony, Thorn…uh…chokes him in order to persuade him to let him override the policy.

“Persuaded,” the usher puts his authorization key back in the slot. The window opens again. Thorn observes the ceremony in awe, having never seen the beautiful Earth of Sol’s youth. He mutters “I didn’t know” and “How could I?” as he watches. Sol tries weakly to tell Thorn something, but the speaker starts glitching, with the SPEAKING PERMITTED INDICATOR flashing on and off. Thorn, helpfully, pounds his fist on the panel and demands that the usher do something to fix it. The user gives Thorn wired earbuds and Thorn continues his conversation. (Extradiegetically, is this so they didn’t have to bother with the usher’s overhearing the conversation? I don’t understand this beat.) The SPEAKING PERMITTED light glows a solid red and they finish their conversation.

Yes, that cable jumps back and forth like that in the movie during the glitch. It was a simpler time.

Sol dies, and the lights come up in the chamber. Two assistants come to push the gurney along a track through a hidden door. Some mechanism in the floor catches the gurney, and the cadaver is whisked away from Thorn’s sight.

Regular experience?

So that’s Thorns corrupt, thuggish cop experience of the thanatorium. Let’s now make some educated guesses about what this might imply for the regular, non-thug experience for beneficiaries.

The patient and beneficiaries enter the building and greeted by staff.
They wait in queue in the lobby for their turn.
The patient is taken by attendants to the “theater” and the beneficiaries taken by the usher to the observation room.
Beneficiaries witness the drinking of the hemlock.
The patient has a moment to talk with the beneficiaries and say their final farewells.
The viewing window is closed as the patient watches the “cinerama” display and dies. The beneficiaries wait quietly in the observation room with the usher.
The viewing window is opened as they watch the attendants wheel the body into the portal.
They return to the lobby to sign some documents for benefits and depart.

So, some UX questions/backworlding

We have to backworld some of the design rationales involved to ground critique and design improvements. After all, design is the optimization of a system for a set of effects, and we want to be certain about what effects we’re targeting. So…

Why would beneficiaries be separated from the patient?

I imagine that the patient might take comfort from holding the hands or being near their loved ones (even if that set didn’t perfectly overlap with their beneficiaries). So why is there a separate viewing room? There are a handful of reasons I can imagine, only one of which is really satisfying.

Maybe it’s to prevent the spread of disease? Certainly given our current multiple pandemics, we understand the need for physical separation in a medical setting. But the movie doesn’t make any fuss about disease being a problem (though with 132,000 people crammed into every square mile of the New York City metropolitan area you’d figure it would be), and in Sol’s case, there’s zero evidence in the film that he’s sick. Why does the usher resist the request from Thorn if this was the case? And why wouldn’t the attendants be in some sort of personal protective gear?

Maybe it’s to hide the ugly facts of dying? Real death is more disconcerting to see than most people are familiar with (take the death rattle as one example) and witnessing it might discourage other citizens from opting-in for the same themselves. But, we see that Sol just passes peacefully from the hemlock drink, so this isn’t really at play here.

Maybe it’s to keep the cinerama experience hidden? It’s showing pictures of an old, bountiful earth that—in the diegesis—no longer exists. Thorn says in the movie that he’s too young to know what “old earth” was like, so maybe this society wants to prevent false hope? Or maybe to prevent rioting, should the truth of How Far We’ve Fallen get out? Or maybe it’s considered a reward for patients opting-in to suicide, thereby creating a false scarcity to further incentivize people to opt-in themselves? None of this is super compelling, and we have to ask, why does the usher give in and open the viewport if any of this was the case?

That blue-green in the upper left of this still is the observation booth.

So, maybe it’s to prevent beneficiaries from trying to interfere with the suicide. This society would want impediments against last-minute shouts of, “Wait! Don’t do it!” There’s some slight evidence against this, as when Sol is drinking the Hemlock, the viewing port is wide open, so beneficiaries might have pounded on the window if this was standard operating procedure. But its being open might have been an artifact of Sol’s having walked in without any beneficiaries. Maybe the viewport is ordinarily closed until after the hemlock, opened for final farewells, closed for the cinerama, and opened again to watch as the body is sped away?

Ecstasy Meat

This rationale supports another, more horrible argument. What if the reason is that Soylent (the company) wants the patient to have an uninterrupted dopamine and seratonin hit at the point of dying, so those neurotransmitters are maximally available in the “meat” before processing? (Like how antibiotics get passed along to meat-eaters in industrialized food today.) It would explain why they ask Sol for his favorite color in the lobby. Yes it is for his pleasure, but not for humane reasons. It’s so he can be at his happiest at the point of death. Dopamine and seratonin would make the resulting product, Soylent green, more pleasurable and addictive to consumers. That gives an additional rationale as to why beneficiaries would be prevented from speaking—it would distract from patients’ intense, pleasurable experience of the cinerama.

A quickly-comped up speculative banner ad reading “You want to feel GOOD GOOD. Load up on Soylent Green today!” — Now, with more Clarendon.

For my money, the “ecstasy meat” rationale reinforces and makes worse the movie’s Dark Secret, so I’m going to go with that. Without this rationale, I’d say rewrite the scene so beneficiaries are in the room with the patient. But with this rationale, let’s keep the rooms separate.

Beneficiary interfaces

Which leads us to rethinking this interface.

Beneficiary interfaces

A first usability note is that the SPEAKING PERMITTED indicator is very confusing. The white text on a black background looks like speaking is, currently, permitted. But then the light behind it illuminates and I guess, then speaking is permitted? But wait, the light is red, so does that mean it’s not permitted, or is? And then adding to the confusion, it blinks. Is that the glitching, or some third state? Can we send this to its own interface thanatorium? So to make this indicator more usable, we could do a couple of things.

Put a ring of lights around the microphone and grill. When illuminated, speaking is permitted. This presumes that the audience can infer what these lights mean, and isn’t accessible to unsighted users, but I don’t think the audio glitch is a major plot point that needs that much reinforcing; see above. If the execs just have to have it crystal clear, then you could…
Have two indicators, one reading SPEAKING PERMITTED and another reading SILENCE PLEASE, with one or the other always lit. If you had to do it on the cheap, they don’t need to be backlit panels, but just two labeled indicator lamps would do.

And no effing blinking.

I think part of the affective purpose of the interface is to show how cold and mechanistic the thanatorium’s treatment of people are. To keep that, you could add another indicator light on the panel labeled somewhat cryptically, PATIENT. Have it illuminated until Sol passes, and then have a close up shot when it fades, indicating his death.

Ah, yes, good to have a reminder that’s why he’s a critic and not a working FUI designer.

A note on art direction. It would be in Soylent’s and our-real-world interest to make this interface feel as humane as possible. Maybe less steel and backlit toggles? Then again, this world is operating on fumes, so they would make do with what’s available. So this should also feel a little more strung together, maybe with some wires sticking out held together with electrical tape and tape holding the audio jack in place.

Last note on the accommodations. What are the beneficiaries supposed to do while the patient is watching the cinerama display? Stand there and look awkward? Let’s get some seats in here and pipe the patient’s selection of music in. That way they can listen and think of the patient in the next room.

If you really want it to feel extradiegetically heartless, put a clock on the wall by the viewing window that beneficiaries can check.

Once we simplify this panel and make the room make design sense, we have to figure out what to do with the usher’s interface elements that we’ve just removed, and that’s the next post.

House of Representin’

5 Nov 2018 by Christopher Noessel

The U.S. House of Representin’ in Idiocracy is a madhouse. When Joe is sworn in as the Secretary of the Interior, he takes his seat in the balcony with the other Cabinet members. He looks down into the gallery. It is dimly lit. When Joe is sworn in as the Secretary of the Interior, he enters the chamber and sits in the balcony with the rest of the Cabinet. He looks down into the gallery. It is dimly lit. There are spotlights roving across the Representatives, who don’t sit at desks but stand in a mosh pit. There is even a center-hung video display like you’d see at an indoor sports area. Six giant LED screens. Ring displays showing weird ASCII characters.

Idiocracy_house-of-representin03 — Sadly, we do not get to *The Sennit* for a comparison.

Someone plays an entrance theme consisting mostly of a cowbell and grunts. Strobe lights flash. An announcer says, like he was announcing a World Wrestling Entertainment performer, “Ladies and gentlemen…the President of America!” Camacho comes out of a side door screaming. He’s dressed in lots of red and white stripes with a cape made of the union blue. (n.b. The federal code forbids the wearing the flag as apparel.) He does some made-up karate poses. There are logos on the rostrum and currency sheets for wallpaper. He stands at the lectern and begins his address to the Representatives by saying, “Shut up.”

There’s a kind of ritual to his entrance, but the proceedings are all chaos. I think if you mentioned the Jefferson’s Manual you’d be accused of talking like a fag. (Jefferson’s Manual was penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1801 and still stands as a guideline for how the House and to a lesser extent the Senate runs its…but there I go talking faggy again.) When the delegation from South Carolina start talking smack, he grabs a semi-automatic and shoots it into the ceiling to get everyone’s attention again.

Ordinarily I might try and critique this as some abstract interface for the task of vetting a Cabinet member or legislating, since it is meant to be that, but Idiocracy is just too far gone. Plus, tomorrow is the midterm elections, and it’s more instructive to talk about its tone.

What makes this scene so marvelous is how un-governmental it all is. It’s macho posing and buzz words. Insults and tribalism. It’s a circus (without, in this case, the bread). Empty promises and showmanship.

Come with me now to walk far, far back from it all, to try to get it all into view and really think hard about the scope of the institution we call government. We grant this thing the highest authority that we possibly can. It has power over our life and death, war and money, our children and our environment—and it is only right that this trust be met by the occupants of that government with gravity, some serious consideration for the power with which they have been entrusted. It is grotesque for it to become a show. When people think corporations and government should be best buds, and the highest offices of the land become a shill for product. When the participants conceive it as a high-school parking lot gang fight where scoring insults against the other team counts as some beer-swilling victory while, you know, actual human suffering and violent death occurs as collateral damage. When they justify horrible things by saying, “You had your turn.” When demagogues keep you stupidly, stupidly distracted.

Idiocracy_house-of-representin02 — Yet here we are.

If this is government, we shout at the screen, those morons in the electorate should replace it with something better.

Replace it with something better

We’re not done with reviews of Idiocracy, but tomorrow is the 2018 midterm election in the USA.

If you’ve stayed with me this far it means you’re probably not a supporter of The Tire Fire in Chief, since, as fascists, they tend to be fanatical and abhor dissent, and would have left the blog long ago. (They will not be missed.) So you’re probably not one of them.

If you’re a progressive or even a moderate, you’ve been as shocked as I have over the past two years, and you realize how much of a disaster this administration has been. Your mind has hopefully already been made up. In early voting or by mail you may have even already voted. Rock on.
Some of my readers may have genuine hardships that prevent them from voting, even in early voting states or by mail. Please do everything you can. Remember Uber and Lyft are offering free and discounted trips to polls (there are even carpool sites), and in most states your employer is required by law to give you paid time off to vote. (Check here.) Some voters will be victims of suppression efforts and holy shit I’m sorry about that.
But let’s presume that there are yet a few undecideds, or who are choosing not to vote out of some sense of hopelessness or protest. Maybe you have some Russian troll farm meme in your head that is preventing you from voting. Not voting may feel like resistance, but it’s actually surrender. With all the voter suppression underway, you’re letting the oppressors win. With all the wrong in the world, you would be complicit. So get over yourself. Stop the decline into Idiocracy. Our choices aren’t perfect. They never are. They never will be. But even if this choice is not perfect, it is clear. The GOP is wrecking democracy, ruining the environment, and making people suffer for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy and their old, white cronies. Broadcast Democrats may not be the answers we need in the long run, but they are the only thing that can stop this Idiocracy, right here, right now.

Vote.

Let me close with a great screed by Lori Gallagher Witt about why she is a liberal. You are a sci-fi fan. You’re used to entertaining the notion of alternate realities. Imagine a world where the following becomes true.

“I’ve always been a liberal, but that doesn’t mean what a lot of you apparently think it does. Let’s break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I’m getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: Not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines:
I believe a country should take care of its weakest members. A country cannot call itself civilized when its children, disabled, sick, and elderly are neglected. Period.
I believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Somehow that’s interpreted as “I believe Obamacare is the end-all, be-all.” This is not the case. I’m fully aware that the ACA has problems, that a national healthcare system would require everyone to chip in, and that it’s impossible to create one that is devoid of flaws, but I have yet to hear an argument against it that makes “let people die because they can’t afford healthcare” a better alternative. I believe healthcare should be far cheaper than it is, and that everyone should have access to it. And no, I’m not opposed to paying higher taxes in the name of making that happen.
I believe education should be affordable and accessible to everyone. It doesn’t necessarily have to be free (though it works in other countries so I’m mystified as to why it can’t work in the US), but at the end of the day, there is no excuse for students graduating college saddled with five- or six-figure debt.
I don’t believe your money should be taken from you and given to people who don’t want to work. I have literally never encountered anyone who believes this. Ever. I just have a massive moral problem with a society where a handful of people can possess the majority of the wealth while there are people literally starving to death, freezing to death, or dying because they can’t afford to go to the doctor. Fair wages, lower housing costs, universal healthcare, affordable education, and the wealthy actually paying their share would go a long way toward alleviating this. Somehow believing that makes me a communist.
I don’t throw around “I’m willing to pay higher taxes” lightly. If I’m suggesting something that involves paying more, well, it’s because I’m fine with paying my share as long as it’s actually going to something besides lining corporate pockets or bombing other countries while Americans die without healthcare.
I believe companies should be required to pay their employees a decent, livable wage. Somehow this is always interpreted as me wanting burger flippers to be able to afford a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. What it actually means is that no one should have to work three full-time jobs just to keep their head above water. Restaurant servers should not have to rely on tips, multibillion-dollar companies should not have employees on food stamps, workers shouldn’t have to work themselves into the ground just to barely make ends meet, and minimum wage should be enough for someone to work 40 hours and live.
I am not anti-Christian. I have no desire to stop Christians from being Christians, to close churches, to ban the Bible, to forbid prayer in school, etc. (BTW, prayer in school is NOT illegal; compulsory prayer in school is—and should be—illegal). All I ask is that Christians recognize my right to live according to my beliefs. When I get pissed off that a politician is trying to legislate Scripture into law, I’m not “offended by Christianity”—I’m offended that you’re trying to force me to live by your religion’s rules. You know how you get really upset at the thought of Muslims imposing Sharia law on you? That’s how I feel about Christians trying to impose biblical law on me. Be a Christian. Do your thing. Just don’t force it on me or mine.
I don’t believe LGBT people should have more rights than you. I just believe they should have the same rights as you.
I don’t believe illegal immigrants should come to America and have the world at their feet, especially since THIS ISN’T WHAT THEY DO (spoiler: undocumented immigrants are ineligible for all those programs they’re supposed to be abusing, and if they’re “stealing” your job it’s because your employer is hiring illegally). I’m not opposed to deporting people who are here illegally, but I believe there are far more humane ways to handle undocumented immigration than our current practices (i.e., detaining children, splitting up families, ending DACA, etc).
I don’t believe the government should regulate everything, but since greed is such a driving force in our country, we NEED regulations to prevent cut corners, environmental destruction, tainted food/water, unsafe materials in consumable goods or medical equipment, etc. It’s not that I want the government’s hands in everything—I just don’t trust people trying to make money to ensure that their products/practices/etc. are actually SAFE. Is the government devoid of shadiness? Of course not. But with those regulations in place, consumers have recourse if they’re harmed and companies are liable for medical bills, environmental cleanup, etc. Just kind of seems like common sense when the alternative to government regulation is letting companies bring their bottom line into the equation.
I believe our current administration is fascist. Not because I dislike them or because I can’t get over an election, but because I’ve spent too many years reading and learning about the Third Reich to miss the similarities. Not because any administration I dislike must be Nazis, but because things are actually mirroring authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past.
I believe the systemic racism and misogyny in our society is much worse than many people think, and desperately needs to be addressed. Which means those with privilege—white, straight, male, economic, etc.—need to start listening, even if you don’t like what you’re hearing, so we can start dismantling everything that’s causing people to be marginalized.
I am not interested in coming after your blessed guns, nor is anyone serving in government. What I am interested in is sensible policies, including background checks, that just MIGHT save one person’s, perhaps a toddler’s, life by the hand of someone who should not have a gun. (Got another opinion? Put it on your page, not mine).
I believe in so-called political correctness. I prefer to think it’s social politeness. If I call you Chuck and you say you prefer to be called Charles I’ll call you Charles. It’s the polite thing to do. Not because everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you’re using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt you to NOT hurt another person?
I believe in funding sustainable energy, including offering education to people currently working in coal or oil so they can change jobs. There are too many sustainable options available for us to continue with coal and oil. Sorry, billionaires. Maybe try investing in something else.
I believe that women should not be treated as a separate class of human. They should be paid the same as men who do the same work, should have the same rights as men and should be free from abuse. Why on earth shouldn’t they be?

I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I’m a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn’t mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don’t believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome as long as money is saved.”

IQ Testing

1 Nov 2018 by Christopher Noessel

When Joe is processed after his arrest, he is taken to a general IQ testing facility. He sits in a chair wearing headphones. A recorded voice asks, “If you have one bucket that holds two gallons, and another bucket that holds five gallons, how many buckets do you have?” Into a microphone he says, incredulous that this is a question, “Two?” The recorded voice says, “Thank you!”

Joe looks to his left to see another subject is trying to put a square blue peg into the middle round hole of a panel and of course failing. Joe looks to his right, to see another subject with a triangular green peg in hand that he’s trying to put into the round middle hole in his interface. Small colored bulbs above each hole are unlit, but they match the colors of the matching blocks, so let’s presume they illuminate when the correct peg is inserted. When you look closely, it’s also apparent that the blocks are tethered to the panel so they’re not lost, and each peg is tethered directly below its matching hole. So there are lots and lots of cues that would let a subject figure it out. And yet, they are not. The subject to Joe’s right even eyes Joe suspiciously and turns his body to cover his test so Joe won’t try and crib…uh…“answers.”

Comedy

The comedy in the scene comes from how rudimentary these challenges are. Most toddlers could complete the shape test. Even if you couldn’t figure out the shapes, you could match the colors, i.e. the blue object goes in the hole under the blue bulb. Most preschoolers could answer the spoken challenge. It underscores the stupidity of this world that generalized IQ tests for adults test below grade school levels.

IQ Testing

Since Binet invented the first one in 1904, IQ testing has a long, and problematic past (racism and using it to justify eugenic arguments, just for instance) but it can have a rational goal: How do we measure the intelligence of a set of people (students in a classroom, or applicants to intelligence jobs) for strategic decisions about aptitude, assistance, and improvement? But intelligence is a very slippery concept, and complicated to study much less test. The good news in this case is that the citizens of Idiocracy don’t have very sophisticated intellects, so very basic tests of intelligence should suffice.

Some nice things

So, that said, the shape test has some nice aspects. The panel is angled so the holes are visible and targetable, without being so vertical it’s easy to drop the pegs while manipulating them. The panel is plenty thick for durability and cleaning. The speech-to-text tech seems to work perfectly, unlike the errors and bad design that riddle most technologies in Idiocracy.

A garden path match

There’s an interesting question of affordances in the device. You can see in the image above that the yellow round block fits just fine in the square hole. Ordinarily, a designer would want to prevent errors like this by, say, increasing the diameter of the round peg (and its hole) so that it couldn’t be inserted into the square hole. That version of the test would just test the time it took by even trial-and-error to match pegs to their matching holes, then you could rank subjects by time-to-completion. But by allowing the round peg to fit in the square hole, you complicate the test with a “garden path” branch where some subjects can get lost in what he thinks is a successful subtask. This makes it harder to compare subjects fairly, because another subject might not have wandered down this path and paid an unfair price in their time-to-complete.

Another complication is that this test has so many different clues. Do they notice the tethers? Do subjects notice the colored bulbs? (What about color blind subjects?) Having it test cognitive skills as well as fine-motor manipulation skills as well as perception skills seems quite complicated and less likely to enable fair comparisons.

We must always scrutinize IQ tests because people put so much stock in them and it can be very much to an individual’s detriment. Designers of these tests ought to instrument them carefully for passive and active feedback about when the test itself is proving to be problematic.

Challenging the “superintelligent?”

A larger failing of the test is that it doesn’t challenge Joe at all. All his results would tell him is that he’s much much more intelligent than these tests are built for. Fair enough, there’s nothing in the world of Idiocracy which would indicate a need to test for superintelligence among the population, but this test had to be built by someone(s), generations ago. Could they not even have the test work on someone as smart as themselves? That’s all it would need to test Joe. But we live in a world that should be quite cautious about the emergence of a superintelligence. It would be comforting to imagine that we could test for that. Maybe we should include the Millennium Problems at the end of every test. Just in case.

Another Idiot Test

As “luck” would have it, Trump tweeted an IQ test just this morning. (I don’t want to link to it to directly add any fuel to his fire, but you can Google it easily.) It’s an outrageous political video ad. As you watch it:

Do you believe that a single anecdote about a troubled, psychotic individual is generalizable to everyone with brown skin? Or even to everyone with brown skin who is not American and seeking legal asylum in the U.S.?
Do you ignore the evidence of the past decades (and the last week) that show it’s conservative white males who are much more of a problem? (Noting that vox is a liberal-leaning publication, but look at the article’s citations.)
Can you tell that the war drums under the ad are there only to make you feel scared, appealing to your emotions with cinematic tricks?
Do you uncritically fall for implicature and the slippery slope fallacy?

If the answers to all these are yes, well, sorry. You’ve failed an IQ test put to you by one of the most blatantly racist political ads since WIllie Horton. (Not many ads warrant a deathbed statement of regret, but that one did.) Maybe it’s best you take the rest of the week off treating yourself. Leave town. Take a road trip somewhere. Eat some ice cream.

For the rest of you, congratulations on passing the test. We have 5 days until the election. Kick the racist bastards and the bastards enabling the racist bastards out.

Cyberspace: the hardware

21 Feb 2017 by scifihughf

And finally we come to the often-promised cyberspace search sequence, my favourite interface in the film. It starts at 36:30 and continues, with brief interruptions to the outside world, to 41:00. I’ll admit there are good reasons not to watch the entire film, but if you are interested in interface design, this will be five minutes well spent. Included here are the relevant clips, lightly edited to focus on the user interfaces.

Click to see video of The cyberspace search.

Click to see Board conversation, with Pharmakom tracker and virus

First, what hardware is required?

Johnny and Jane have broken into a neighbourhood computer shop, which in 2021 will have virtual reality gear just as today even the smallest retailer has computer mice. Johnny clears miscellaneous parts off a table and then sits down, donning a headset and datagloves.

Headset

Headsets haven’t really changed much since 1995 when this film was made. Barring some breakthrough in neural interfaces, they remain the best way to block off the real world and immerse a user into the virtual world of the computer. It’s mildly confusing to a current day audience to hear Johnny ask for “eyephones”, which in 1995 was the name of a particular VR headset rather than the popular “iPhone” of today.

Throughout this cyberspace sequence the virtual reality system Johnny uses gives vocal feedback, usually just confirming what has happened or repeating information visible in cyberspace. Johnny will also use voice commands himself. Jane seemingly can’t hear this feedback, as she has no idea what is happening other than what Johnny tells her. No earbuds or headphones are visible, but nearly all headsets then and now incorporate audio output as well as visual display so presumably sound is the function of the silver bulges at the back of the headset.

Dataglove

Datagloves are less common today. These track the position and orientation of the hands as they move, in this particular case to the bending of individual fingers. In 1995 this was done with magnetic or ultrasonic trackers on each hand and various fibre optic or potentiometer bend sensors on the finger joints, all built into a rather bulky glove. Today this can be done passively by a video camera, for example the Microsoft Kinect or Leap Motion Controller. With these technologies it’s not even necessary to paint dots on the fingers, which unlike faces have convenient gaps in between the points of interest.

Johnny mostly keeps his arms horizontal just above the table surface, but we will occasionally see him reach up. As chapter 5 of Make It So points out, trying to operate a vertical touch screen or gesture interface for any length of time is exhausting, and the same would be true if the VR system required him to frequently lift his hands and arms above the conventional keyboard height.

System status

There is also a system status display on the table.

Various indicators light up as Johnny gets ready. It would be helpful if this were mirrored to the headset, so Johnny could at least see which components are working or not without removing it.

My first impression was that the grid on the table might be some kind of optical tracking aid. Then I remembered that this is a worktable, and protective table mats with a grid pattern printed on them are sold in craft and hardware shops. Not everything in the future needs to be advanced technology.

Voice feedback

As Johnny performs his various actions in cyberspace, another synthesized voice gives him constant feedback, most often telling him which actions and objects have been selected. I suggest this is for new users, who may be confused about exactly what they can and cannot do in virtual reality. (Of course, it is also very useful for telling us the audience what is happening.) Johnny himself is not a new VR users, but since this is a system assembled straight out of the box he gets the default setting. Over time a voice constantly telling you what you’ve done probably becomes irritating, which is why earlier systems were not so chatty.

The tracker

We see a second person in cyberspace during this sequence, although only briefly. This is the Pharmakom tracker, who is trying to locate Johnny and Jane for the Yakuza.

He too wears a headset and gloves, but also has a one piece earphone and microphone. He uses this not for voice commands, but for a phone connection to Shinji, the Yakuza leader in a car.

He is standing in front of a lectern type display.

This shows a street map, with the red cross hairs presumably the location being examined. Current day VR systems often mirror what the headset is showing to a more conventional display as this is very useful in testing and debugging. Note also the rows of unmarked buttons on either side. I’ll discuss these and similar buttons below.

Having him stand is an interesting choice. The advantage of standing in VR is that it allows the participant to bend and turn more freely, using body motion as an input as well as hands and head. The disadvantages are that this is more tiring, and that with the headset blocking the real world, it’s very easy to bump into things. The first commercial VR game, “Dactyl Nightmare” by W Industries, had a waist-high padded fence around the player to stop them falling over or walking too far and breaking the cables.

VR1000 restored by Simon Marston

Here the tracker is risking a painful bruised knee. Perhaps he is a standing desk enthusiast who believes the other health benefits make it worthwhile.

The Curious Unmarked Buttons…

A recurring hardware interface in Johnny Mnemonic is the grid of unmarked buttons. There were two in the upload hotel suite, the image grabber, and the fax machine. And here the lectern display used by the tracker has more of the same.

I can’t recall any others like this, with one exception: the Pixar animated short “Lifted”, which has a vast array of unmarked identical switches. But that was a deliberate caricature, making fun of terribly designed and confusing interfaces.

Research tells us that labelled buttons and keys are the best for learning and use, from computers and phones to their software equivalents on modern touchscreen phones. Even the buttons on consumer remote controls are marked, however cryptic the symbols may be. The only unmarked buttons in current day regular use are those used around the edges of displays for ATMs and in aircraft cockpits. Here the meaning of these “soft buttons” will be shown by the text or graphic displayed nearby.

But this isn’t possible for the unmarked buttons in Johnny Mnemonic, which either don’t have screens or don’t have buttons next to the screen.

…Are a platform for virtual buttons

Perhaps the buttons on the lectern are unmarked because they’re intended for use in cyberspace. If the computer system generating the virtual reality is aware of the lectern’s location in relation to the user, it could generate labels within the virtual reality that the user would perceive as exactly where the physical buttons are. The buttons would then provide actual tactile feedback for location and when pressed.

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.

Headsets

20 Dec 2016 by Christopher Noessel

Luke, Chewie, the comms officer aboard the Revenge, and this orange lizard/cat thing wear similar headsets in the short. Each consists of headphones with a coronal headband and a microphone on a boom that holds it in front of their mouths.

An animated character with short blonde hair and headphones, seated in a spaceship cockpit with a view of space in the background.

Screenshot of a monitor displaying a red creature and a robotic figure in a futuristic environment with computer interface elements.

The only time we see something resembling a control, Luke attempts to report back to the Rebel base. To do so, he uses his right hand to pinch (or hold?) the microphone as he says, “This is Y4 to base.” Then he releases the mic and continues, “He’s heading straight for a moon in…the Panna system.”

Questionable sound isolation

Part of the point of the headsets is to isolate sounds coming through the radio from the ambient noise. But Luke can hear and chat with C-3PO speaking at regular, conversational volumes, so it’s not isolating that much sound. Maybe it’s super-sophisticated noise-cancellation but that’s a lot of credit to give considering the evidence.

Additionally, when Chewie shoots across the bow at the Y-Wing, we hear the artificially-generated weapon-warning noises throughout the cockpit, so it’s a detriment to hide that noise from him. Better would be to have the audio incorporated into the cockpit, which lets him listen for the sounds of the Y-wing around him as well.

Unclear Activation

It’s not exactly clear that Luke’s touching the mic is an affectation or an actual control. If it was push-to-talk the Revenge wouldn’t have heard anything when he lifted his hands after the callsigns and spoke the actual message. Hopefully it’s not.

The Y-Wing is a combat ship, so it’s questionable to require the pilot to dedicate a hand that could be needed for complex maneuvers for the duration of speech. In fact, it seems to undo much of the benefit of wearing a headset instead of using a handset or something like a handheld CB radio microphone (like Wash’s comm system in Firefly).

A wise design would assign one of those many stay-state toggle switches on the console to keep the channel open and operate by voice activation in maneuver-heavy situations. For more casual conversation, he could switch it back to push-to-talk mode, to avoid accidental noise or interruptions on the channel.

It should be said that a wise pilot needing to communicate with his hands on the yoke might offload this task to the human-cyborg relations droid sitting right there behind him, but you know who am I to question an animated Jedi?

Semantic Controls

Having the control located at the mic is an intuitive design choice, because it means users can chunk these two things as a single thing in memory: The place for talking. It might seem a little odd because when you speak without a mic you would cover your mouth to muffle speech, but since with the headset you’re speaking with the person “in” the mic, the semantics make sense. The behavior also serves a nice social signal to others in the room to indicate that the speaker is communicating to someone not present (similar to the headset ear-touches in The Fifth Element.)

This pinch-to-talk control also appears in *A New Hope*, briefly, during the attack on the Death Star, so has precedent.

Questionable mic placement

Having the mic directly in front of the mouth is a poor placement. As sci-fi fans know, speech is air squirted through meat, and putting a mic in the path of that air means the plosive sounds (t, k, p, d, g, and b) can peak out. For audio purists, the proximity effect also means that the proximity of a directional mic to the mouth will over-accentuate and peak the bass responses. But, maybe the Rebels have access to omnidirectional mics that avoid the proximity effect. Still, a better placement to avoid the popping plosives would be just off of the rushing column of squirted air, say near the cheek or chin.

Security

When Luke says “Y4 to base,” it indicates that the system is a radiotelephony model, like the ham radio system. People agree to use radio to speak and listen on pre-arranged channels or sequence of channels, and anyone who knows the channel can lurk and steal important information, like, say, the location of the most wanted Rebel outlaws in the galaxy.

Modern, encrypted, one-to-one communications systems make this seem horribly not-secure, but such systems proved reasonable throughout the World Wars of the prior century. But, even back then there were lots of ways to hedge your bets towards privacy, (like using code or Selective Calling to name just a few) so its absence here is striking, especially since we’ll see in the next review how easy it is to intercept even video messages in the world of The Faithful Wookiee.

That said, extradiegetically, we can cut some slack since they probably aren’t speaking English, either, and both the common and coded Aurebesh have been translated for us.

Viper Launch Control

1 Nov 2016 by claytonbeese

The Galactica’s fighter launch catapults are each controlled by a ‘shooter’ in an armored viewing pane. There is one ‘shooter’ for every two catapults. To launch a Viper, he has a board with a series of large twist-handles, a status display, and a single button. We can also see several communication devices:

Ear-mounted mic and speaker
Board mounted mic
Phone system in the background

These could relate to one of several lines of communication each:

The Viper pilot
Any crew inside the launch pod
Crew just outside the launch pod
CIC (for strategic status updates)
Other launch controllers at other stations
Engineering teams
‘On call’ rooms for replacement operators

Each row on the launch display appears to conform to some value coming off of the Viper or the Galactica’s magnetic catapults. The ‘shooter’ calls off Starbuck’s launch three times due to some value he sees on his status board (fluctuating engine power right before launch).

We do not see any other data inputs. Something like a series of cameras on a closed circuit could show him an exterior view of the entire Viper, providing additional information to the sensors.

When Starbuck is ready to launch on the fourth try, the ‘shooter’ twists the central knob and, at the same time and with the same hand, pushes down a green button. The moment the ‘shooter’ hits the button, Starbuck’s Viper is launched into space.

There are other twist knobs across the entire board, but these do not appear to conform directly to the act of launching the Viper, and they do not act like the central knob. They appear instead to be switches, where turning them from one position to another locks them in place.

There is no obvious explanation for the number of twist knobs, but each one might conform to an electrical channel to the catapult, or some part of the earlier launch sequence.

Manual Everything

Nothing in the launch control interprets anything for the ‘shooter’. He is given information, then expected to interpret it himself. From what we see, this information is basic enough to not cause a problem and allow him to quickly make a decision.

Without networking the launch system together so that it can poll its own information and make its own decisions, there is little that can improve the status indicators. (And networking is made impossible in this show because of Cylon hackers.) The board is easily visible from the shooter chair, each row conforms directly to information coming in from the Viper, and the relate directly to the task at hand.

The most dangerous task the shooter does is actually decide to launch the Viper into space. If either the Galactica or the Viper isn’t ready for that action, it could cause major damage to the Viper and the launch systems.

A two-step control for this is the best method, and the system now requires two distinct motions (a twist-and-hold, then a separate and distinct *click*). This is effective at confirming that the shooter actually wants to send the Viper into space.

To improve this control, the twist and button could be moved far enough apart (reference, under “Two-Hand Controls” ) that it requires two hands to operate the control. That way, there is no doubt that the shooter intends to activate the catapult.

If the controls are separated like that, it would take some amount of effort to make sure the two controls are visually connected across the board, either through color, or size, or layout. Right now, that would be complicated by the similarity in the final twist control, and the other handles that do different jobs.

Changing these controls to large switches or differently shaped handles would make the catapult controls less confusing to use.

The Galactica Phone Network

11 Oct 2016 by claytonbeese

The phone system aboard the Galactica is a hardwired system that can be used in two modes: Point-to-point, and one-to-many. The phones have an integrated handset wired to a control box and speaker. The buttons on the control box are physical keys, and there are no automatic voice controls.

In Point-to-point mode, the phones act as a typical communication system, where one station can call a single other station. In the one-to-many mode the phones are used as a public address system, where a single station can broadcast to the entire ship.

The phones are also shown acting as broadcast speakers. These speakers are able to take in many different formats of audio, and are shown broadcasting various different feeds:

Ship-wide Alerts (“Action Stations!”)
Local alarms (Damage control/Fire inside a specific bulkhead)
Radio Streams (pilot audio inside the launch prep area)
Addresses (calling a person to the closest available phone)

Each station is independent and generic. Most phones are located in public spaces or large rooms, with only a few in private areas. These private phones serve the senior staff in their private quarters, or at their stations on the bridge.

In each case, the phone stations are used as kiosks, where any crewmember can use any phone. It is implied that there is a communications officer acting as a central operator for when a crewmember doesn’t know the appropriate phone number, or doesn’t know the current location of the person they want to reach.

Utterly Basic

There is not a single advanced piece of technology inside the phone system. The phones act as a dirt-simple way to communicate with a place, not a person (the person just happens to be there while you’re talking).

The largest disadvantage of this system is that it provides no assistance for its users: busy crewmembers of an active warship. These crew can be expected to need to communicate in the heat of battle, and quickly relay orders or information to a necessary party.

This is easy for the lower levels of crewmembers: information will always flow up to the bridge or a secondary command center. For the officers, this task becomes more difficult.

First, there are several crewmember classes that could be anywhere on the ship:

Security
Damage Control
Couriers
Other officers

Without broadcasting to the entire ship, it could be extremely difficult to locate these specific crewmembers in the middle of a battle for information updates or new orders.

Unconventional Enemy

The primary purpose of the Galactica was to fight the Cylons: sentient robots capable of infiltrating networked computers. This meant that every system on the Galactica was made as basic as possible, without regard to its usability.

The Galactica’s antiquated phone system does prevent Cylon infiltration of a communications network aboard an active warship. Nothing the phone system does requires executing outside pieces of software.

A very basic upgrade to the phone system that could provide better usability would be a near-field tag system for each crew member. A passive near-field chip could be read by a non-networked phone terminal each time a crew member approached near the phone. The phone could then send a basic update to a central board at the Communications Center informing the operators of where each crewmember is. Such a system would not provide an attack surface (a weakness for them to infiltrate) for the enemy, and make finding officers and crew in an emergency situation both easier and faster: major advantages for a warship.

The near field sensors would add a second benefit, in that only registered crew could access specific terminals. As an example, the Captain and senior staff would be the only ones allowed to use the central phone system.

Brutally efficient hardware

The phone system succeeds in its hardware. Each terminal has an obvious speaker that makes a distinct sound each time the terminal is looking for a crewmember. When the handset is in use, it is easy to tell which side is up after a very short amount of training (the cable always comes out the bottom).

It is also obvious when the handset is active or inactive. When a crewmember pulls the handset out of its terminal, the hardware makes a distinctive audible and physical *click* as the switch opens a channel. The handset also slots firmly back into the terminal, making another *click* when the switch deactivates. This is very similar to a modern-day gas pump.

With a brief amount of training, it is almost impossible to mistake when the handset activates and deactivates.

Quick Wins

For a ship built in the heat of war at a rapid pace, the designers focused on what they could design quickly and efficiently. There is little in the way of creature comforts in the Phone interface.

Minor additions in technology or integrated functionality could have significantly improved the interface of the phone system, and may have been integrated into future ships of the Galactica’s line. Unfortunately, we never see if the military designers of the Galactica learned from their haste.

Her: interface components (2/8)

11 Feb 2014 by Christopher Noessel

Depending on how you slice things, the OS1 interface consists of five components and three (and a half) capabilities.

1. An Earpiece

The earpiece is small and wireless, just large enough to fit snugly in the ear and provide an easy handle for pulling out again. It has two modes. When the earpiece is in Theodore’s ear, it’s in private mode, hearable only by him. When the earpiece is out, the speaker is as loud as a human speaking at room volume. It can produce both voice and other sounds, offering a few beeps and boops to signal needing attention and changes in the mode.

2. Cameo phone

I think I have to make up a name for this device, and “cameo phone” seems to fit. This small, hand-sized, bi-fold device has one camera on the outside an one on the inside of the recto, and a display screen on the inside of the verso. It folds along its long edge, unlike the old clamshell phones. The has smartphone capabilities. It wirelessly communicates with the internet. Theodore occasionally slides his finger left to right across the wood, so it has some touch-gesture sensitivity. A stripe around the outside-edge of the cameo can glow red to act as a visual signal to get its user’s attention. This is quite useful when the cameo is folded up and sitting on a nightstand, for instance.

Theodore uses Samantha almost exclusively through the earpiece and cameo phone, and it is this that makes OS1 a wearable system.

3. A beauty-mark camera

Only present for the surrogate sex scene, this small wireless (are we at the point when we can stop specifying that?) camera affixes to the skin and has the appearance of a beauty mark.

4. (Unseen) microphones

Whether in the cameo phone, the desktop screen, or ubiquitously throughout the environment, OS1 can hear Theodore speak wherever he is over the course of the film.

5. Desktop screen

Theodore only uses a large monitor for OS1 on his desktop a few times. It is simply another access point as far as OS1 is concerned. Really, there’s nothing remarkable about this screen. It is notable that there’s no keyboard. All input is provided by either voice, camera, or a touch gesture on the cameo.

If those are components to the interface, they provide the medium for her 3.5 capabilities.

Her capabilities

1. Voice interface

Users can speak to OS1 in fully-natural language, as if speaking to another person. OS1 speaks back with fully-human spoken articulation. Theodore’s older OS had a voice interface, but because of its lack of artificial intelligence driving it, the interactions were limited to constrained commands like, “Read email.”

2. Computer vision

Samantha can process what she sees through the camera lens of the cameo perfectly. She recognizes distinct objects, people, and gestures at the physical and pragmatic level. I don’t think we ever see things from Samatha’s perspective, but we do have a few quick close ups of the camera lens.

3. Artificial Intelligence

The most salient aspect of the interface is that OS1 is a fully realized “Strong” artificial intelligence.

It would like me to try and get to some painfully-crafted definition of what counts as either an artificial intelligence or sentience, but in this case we don’t really need a tight definition to help suss out whether or not Samantha is one. That’s the central conceit of the film, and the evidence is just overwhelming.

She has a human command of language.
She’s fully versed in the nuances of human emotion (and Theodore has a glut of them to engage).
She has emotions and can fairly be described as emotional. She has a sexual drive.
She has existential crises and a rich theory of mind. At one point she dreamily asks Theodore “What’s it like to be alive in that room right now?” as if she was a philosophical teen idly chatting with her boyfriend over the phone.
She commits lies of omission in hiding uncomfortable truths.
She changes over time. She solves problems. She learns. She creates.
She has a sense of humor. When Theodore tells her early on to “read email” in the weird toComputerese (my name for that 1970s dialect of English spoken only between humans and machines) grammar he had been using with his old operating system, Samantha jokingly adopts a robotic voice and replies, “OK. I will read the email for Theodore Twombly” and gets a good laugh out of him before he apologizes.

Pedants will have some fun discussing whether this is apt but I’m moving forward with it as a given. She’s sentient.

3.5 An “operating system”

This item only counts as half a thing because Theodore uses it as an operating system maaaybe twice in the film. Really, this categorization is a MacGuffin to explain why he gets it in the first place, but it has little to no other bearing on the film.

What’s missing?

Notably missing in OS1 is a face or any other visual anthropomorphic aspect. There’s no Samantha-faced Clippy. Notice that she’s very carefully disembodied. Jonze does not spend screen time close up on her camera lens, like Kubrick did with HAL’s unblinking eye. Had he done so, it would have given us the impression that she’s somewhere behind that eye. But she’s not. Even in the prop design, he makes sure the camera lens itself looks unremarkable, neutral, and unexpressive, and never gets a lingering focus.

Her “organs,” like the cameo and earpiece, don’t even connect together physically at all. Speaking as she does through the earpiece means she doesn’t exist as a voice from some speaker mounted to the wall. She exists across various displays and devices, in some psychological ether between them. For us, she’s a voiceover existing everywhere at once. For Theodore, she’s just a delightful voice in his head. An angel—or possibly a ghost—borne unto him.

This disembodiment (both the design and the cinematic treatment) frees Theodore and the audience from the negative associations of many other sci-fi intelligences, robots, and unfortunate experiments in commercial artificial intelligence that got trapped in the muck of the uncanny valley. One of the main reasons designers have to be careful about invoking the anthropomorphic sense in users is because it will raise expectations of human capabilities that modern technology just can’t match. But OS1 can match and exceed those expectations, since it’s an AI in a work of fiction, so Jonze is free of that constraint.

And having no visual to accompany a human-like voice allows users to imagine our own “perfect” embodiment to the voice. Relying on the imagination to provide the visuals makes the emotional engagement greater, as it does with our crushes on radio personalities, or the unseen monster in a horror movie. Movies can never create as fulfilling an image for an individual audience member as their imagination can. Theodore could picture whatever he wanted to–even if he wanted to–to accompany Samantha’s computer-generated voice. Unfortunately for the audience, Jonze cast Scarlett Johansen, a popular actress whose image we are instantly able to recall upon hearing her husky, sultry voice, so the imagined-perfection is more difficult for us.

This is just the components and capabilities. Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the key interactions with OS1.

The HoverChair Social Network

14 Jan 2014 by claytonbeese

The other major benefit to the users of the chair (besides the ease of travel and lifestyle) is the total integration of the occupant’s virtual social life, personal life, fashion (or lack-thereof), and basic needs in one device. Passengers are seen talking with friends remotely, not-so-remotely, playing games, getting updated on news, and receiving basic status updates. The device also serves as a source of advertising (try blue! it’s the new red!).

A slight digression: What are the ads there for? Considering that the Axiom appears to be an all-inclusive permanent resort model, the ads could be an attempt to steer passengers to using resources that the ship knows it has a lot of. This would allow a reprieve for heavily used activities/supplies to be replenished for the next wave of guests, instead of an upsell maneuver to draw more money from them. We see no evidence of exchange of money or other economic activity while on-board the Axiom…

OK, back to the social network.

Security?

It isn’t obvious what the form of authentication is for the chairs. We know that the chairs have information about who the passenger prefers to talk to, what they like to eat, where they like to be aboard the ship, and what their hobbies are. With that much information, if there was no constant authentication, an unscrupulous passenger could easily hop in another person’s chair, “impersonate” them on their social network, and play havoc with their network. That’s not right.

It’s possible that the chair only works for the person using it, or only accesses the current passenger’s information from a central computer in the Axiom, but it’s never shown. What we do know is that the chair activates when a person is sitting on it and paying attention to the display, and that it deactivates as soon as that display is cut or the passenger leaves the chair.

We aren’t shown what happens when the passenger’s attention is drawn away from the screen, since they are constantly focused on it while the chair is functioning properly.

If it doesn’t already exist, the hologram should have an easy to push button or gesture that can dismiss the picture. This would allow the passenger to quickly interact with the environment when needed, then switch back to the social network afterwards.

And, for added security in case it doesn’t already exist, biometrics would be easy for the Axiom. Tracking the chair user’s voice, near-field chip, fingerprint on the control arm, or retina scan would provide strong security for what is a very personal activity and device. This system should also have strong protection on the back end to prevent personal information from getting out through the Axiom itself.

Social networks hold a lot of very personal information, and the network should have protections against the wrong person manipulating that data. Strong authentication can prevent both identity theft and social humiliation.

Taking the occupant’s complete attention

While the total immersion of social network and advertising seems dystopian to us (and that’s without mentioning the creepy way the chair removes a passenger’s need for most physical activity), the chair looks genuinely pleasing to its users.

They enjoy it.

But like a drug, their enjoyment comes at the detriment of almost everything else in their lives. There seem to be plenty of outlets on the ship for active people to participate in their favorite activities: Tennis courts, golf tees, pools, and large expanses for running or biking are available but unused by the passengers of the Axiom.

Work with the human need

In an ideal world a citizen is happy, has a mixture of leisure activities, and produces something of benefit to the civilization. In the case of this social network, the design has ignored every aspect of a person’s life except moment-to-moment happiness.

This has parallels in goal driven design, where distinct goals (BNL wants to keep people occupied on the ship, keep them focused on the network, and collect as much information as possible about what everyone is doing) direct the design of an interface. When goal-driven means data driven, then the data being collected instantly becomes the determining factor of whether a design will succeed or fail. The right data goals means the right design. Wrong data goals mean the wrong design.

Instead of just occupying a person’s attention, this interface could have instead been used to draw people out and introduce them to new activities at intervals driven by user testing and data. The Axiom has the information and power, perhaps even the responsibility, to direct people to activities that they might find interesting. Even though the person wouldn’t be looking at the screen constantly, it would still be a continuous element of their day. The social network could have been their assistant instead of their jailer.

One of the characters even exclaims that she “didn’t even know they had a pool!”. Indicating that she would have loved to try it, but the closed nature of the chair’s social network kept her from learning about it and enjoying it. By directing people to ‘test’ new experiences aboard the Axiom and releasing them from its grip occasionally, the social network could have acted as an assistant instead of an attention sink.

Moment-to-moment happiness might have declined, but overall happiness would have gone way up.

The best way for designers to affect the outcome of these situations is to help shape the business goals and metrics of a project. In a situation like this, after the project had launched a designer could step in and point out those moments were a passenger was pleasantly surprised, or clearly in need of something to do, and help build a business case around serving those needs.

The obvious moments of happiness (that this system solves for so well) could then be augmented by serendipitous moments of pleasure and reward-driven workouts.

We must build products for more than just fleeting pleasure

As soon as the Axiom lands back on Earth, the entire passenger complement leaves the ship (and the social network) behind.

It was such a superficial pleasure that people abandoned it without hesitation when they realized that there was something more rewarding to do. That’s a parallel that we can draw to many current products. The product can keep attention for now, but something better will come along and then their users will abandon them.

A company can produce a product or piece of software that fills a quick need and initially looks successful. But, that success falls apart as soon as people realize that they have larger and tougher problems that need solving.

Ideally, a team of designers at BNL would have watched after the initial launch and continued improving the social network. By helping people continue to grow and learn new skills, the social network could have kept the people aboard the Axiom it top condition both mentally and physically. By the time Wall-E came around, and life finally began to return to Earth, the passengers would have been ready to return and rebuild civilization on their own.

To the designers of a real Axiom Social Network: You have the chance to build a tool that can save the world.

We know you like blue! Now it looks great in Red!