The second interface David has to monitor those in hypersleep is the Neuro-Visor, a helmet that lets him perceive their dreams. The helmet is round, solid, and white. The visor itself is yellow and back-lit. The yellow is the same greenish-yellow underneath the hypersleep beds and clearly establishes the connection between the devices to a new user. When we see David’s view from inside the visor, it is a cinematic, fully-immersive 3D projection of events in her dreams, that is presented in the “spot elevations” style that is predominant throughout the film (more on this display technique later).
Later in the movie we see David using this same helmet to communicate with Weyland who is in a hypersleep chamber, but Weyland is somehow conscious enough to have a back-and-forth dialogue with David. We don’t see either David’s for Weyland’s perspective in the scene.
As an interface, the helmet seems straightforward. He has one Neuro-Visor for all the hypersleep chambers, and to pair the device to a particular one, he simply touches the surface of the chamber near the hyper sleeper’s head. Cyan interface elements on that translucent interface confirm the touch and presumably allow some degree of control of the visuals. To turn the Neuro-Visor off, he simply removes it from his head. These are simple and intuitive gestures that makes the Neuro-Visor one of the best and most elegantly designed interfaces in the movie.
Several times throughout the movie, Loki uses places the point of the glaive on a victim’s chest near their heart, and a blue fog passes from the stone to infect them: an electric blackness creeps upward along their skin from their chest until it reaches their eyes, which turn fully black for a moment before becoming the same ice blue of the glaive’s stone, and we see that the victim is now enthralled into Loki’s servitude.
You have heart.
The glaive is very, very terribly designed for this purpose. Continue reading →
So this is going to take a few posts. You see, the next interface that appears in The Avengers is a video conference between Tony Stark in his Iron Man supersuit and his partner in romance and business, Pepper Potts, about switching Stark Tower from the electrical grid to their independent power source. Here’s what a still from the scene looks like.
So on the surface of this scene, it’s a communications interface.
But that chat exists inside of an interface with a conceptual and interaction framework that has been laid down since the original Iron Man movie in 2008, and built upon with each sequel, one in 2010 and one in 2013. (With rumors aplenty for a fourth one…sometime.)
So to review the video chat, I first have to talk about the whole interface, and that has about 6 hours of prologue occurring across 4 years of cinema informing it. So let’s start, as I do with almost every interface, simply by describing it and its components. Continue reading →
Hover technology is a thing in 2015(1985) and it appears many places.
Hoverboards
When Marty has troubles with Griff Tannan he borrows a young girl’s hover scooter and breaks off its handlebar. Hes able to put his skateboarding skills to use on the resulting hover board.
Griff and his gang chases Marty on their own hover boards. Griffs has a top of the line hover board labeled a Pit Bull. Though Marty clearly has to manually supply forward momentum to his, Griffs has miniature swivel-mount jet engines that (seem to) respond to the way he shifts his weight on the board.
Hovertraction
George requires traction for a back problem, but this doesn’t ground him. A hover device clamps his ankles in place and responds to foot motions to move him around.
Hover tech is ideal for leaning control, like what controls a Segway. That’s just what seems to be working in the hoverboard and hovertraction devices. Lean in the direction you wish to travel, just like walking. No modality, just new skills to learn.
Mordo wears the Vaulting Boots of Valtor throughout the movie and first demonstrates their use to Dr. Strange when they are sparring. The Boots allow the user to walk, run, or jump on air as if it were solid ground.
When activated, the sole of each boot creates a circular field of force in anticipation of a footfall in midair, as if creating free-floating stepping stones.
How might this work as tech?
The main interaction design challenge is how the wearer indicates where he wants a stepping-stone to appear. The best solution is to let Mordo’s footfall location and motion inform the boots when and where he expects there to be a solid surface. (Anyone who has stumbled while misjudging the height or location of a step on a stairway knows how differently you treat a step where you expect there to be solid footing.)
If this were a technological device, sensors within the boots would retain a detailed history of the wearer’s stride for all possible speeds and distances of movement. The boots would detect muscle tension and flexion combined with the owner’s direction and velocity to accurately predict the placement of each step and then insert an appropriately elevated and angled stepping stone. The boots would know the difference between each of these styles of movement, walking, running, and sprinting and behave accordingly.
As a result, Mordo could always remain upright and stable regardless of his intended direction or how high he had climbed. And while Mordo may be a sorcerer with exceptional physical training, he isn’t superhuman. With the power of the boots he is only able to run and step as high as he could normally if for example he was taking a set of stairs two or three at a time.
As a magical device, the intelligence imbued in the boots is limited to the awareness of the intent of the sorcerer and knows where to place each force-field stepping-stone.
This is one of those sci-fi interactions that seems simple when you view it, but then on analysis it turns out to be anything but. So set aside some time, this analysis will be one of the longer ones even broken into four parts.
The Eye of Agamotto is a medallion that (spoiler) contains the emerald Time Infinity Stone, held on by a braided leather strap. It is made of brass, about a hand’s breadth across, in the shape of a stylized eye that is covered by the same mystical sigils seen on the rose window of the New York Sanctum, and the portal door from Kamar-Taj to the same.
World builders may rightly ask why this universe-altering artifact bears a sigil belonging to just one of the Sanctums.
We see the Eye used in three different places in the film, and in each place it works a little differently.
The Tibet Mode
The Hong Kong Modes
The Dark Dimension Mode
The Tibet Mode
When the film begins, the Eye is under the protection of the Masters of the Mystic Arts in Kamar-Taj, where there’s even a user manual. Unfortunately it’s in mysticalese (or is it Tibetan? See comments) so we can’t read it to understand what it says. But we do get a couple of full-screen shots. Are there any cryptanalysists in the readership who can decipher the text?
They really should put the warnings before the spells.
The power button
Strange opens the old tome and reads “First, open the eye of Agamotto.” The instructions show him how to finger-tut a diamond shape with both hands and spread them apart. In response the lid of the eye opens, revealing a bright green glow within. At the same time the components of the sigil rotate around the eye until they become an upper and lower lid. The green glow of this “on state” persists as long as Strange is in time manipulation mode.
Once it’s turned on, he puts the heels of his palms together, fingers splayed out, and turns them clockwise to create a mystical green circle in the air before him. At the same time two other, softer green bands spin around his forearm and elbow. Thrusting his right hand toward the circle while withdrawing his left hand behind the other, he transfers control of the circle to just his right hand, where it follows the position of his palm and the rotation of his wrist as if it was a saucer mystically glued there.
Then he can twist his wrist clockwise while letting his fingers close to a fist, and the object on which he focuses ages. When he does this to an apple, we see it with progressively more chomps out of it until it is a core that dries and shrivels. Twisting his wrist counter clockwise, the focused object reverses aging, becoming younger in staggered increments. With his middle finger upright, the object reverts to its “natural” age.
Pausing and playing
At one point he wants to stop practicing with the apple and try it on the tome whose pages were ripped out. He relaxes his right hand and the green saucer disappears, allowing him to manipulate it and a tome without changing their ages. To reinstate the saucer, he extends his fingers out and gives his hand a shake, and it fades back into place.
Tibet Mode Analysis: The best control type
The Eye has a lot of goodness to it. Time has long been mapped to circles in sun dials and clock faces, so the circle controls fit thematically quite well. The gestural components make similar sense. The direction of wrist twist coincides with the movement of clock hands, so it feels familiar. Also we naturally look at and point at objects of focus, so using the extended arm gesture combined with gaze monitoring fits the sense of control. Lastly, those bands and saucers look really cool, both mystical in pattern and vaguely technological with the screen-green glow.
Readers of the blog know that it rarely just ends after compliments. To discuss the more challenging aspects of this interaction with the Eye, it’s useful to think of it as a gestural video scrubber for security footage, with the hand twist working like a jog wheel. Not familiar with that type of control? It’s a specialized dial, often used by video editors to scroll back and forth over video footage, to find particular sequences or frames. Here’s a quick show-and-tell by YouTube user BrainEatingZombie.
Is this the right kind of control?
There are other options to consider for the dial types of the Eye. What we see in the movie is a jog dial with hard stops, like you might use for an analogue volume control. The absolute position of the control maps to a point in a range of values. The wheel stops at the extents of the values: for volume controls, complete silence on one end and max volume at the other.
But another type is a shuttle wheel. This kind of dial has a resting position. You can turn it clockwise or counterclockwise, and when you let go, it will spring back to the resting position. While it is being turned, it enacts a change. The greater the turn, the faster the change. Like a variable fast-forward/reverse control. If we used this for a volume control: a small turn to the left means, “Keep lowering the volume a little bit as long as I hold the dial here.” A larger turn to the left means, “Get quieter faster.” In the case of the Eye, Strange could turn his hand a little to go back in time slowly, and fully to reverse quickly. This solves some mapping problems (discussed below) but raises new issues when the object just doesn’t change that much across time, like the tome. Rewinding the tome, Strange would start slow, see no change, then gradually increase speed (with no feedback from the tome to know how fast he was going) and suddenly he’d fly way past a point of interest. If he was looking for just the state change, then we’ve wasted his time by requiring him to scroll to find it. If he’s looking for details in the moment of change, the shuttle won’t help him zoom in on that detail, either.
There are also free-spin jog wheels, which can specify absolute or relative values, but since Strange’s wrist is not free-spinning, this is a nonstarter to consider. So I’ll make the call and say what we see in the film, the jog dial, is the right kind of control.
So if a jog dial is the right type of dial, and you start thinking of the Eye in terms of it being a video scrubber, it’s tackling a common enough problem: Scouring a variable range of data for things of interest. In fact, you can imagine that something like this is possible with sophisticated object recognition analyzing security footage.
The investigator scrubs the video back in time to when the Mona Lisa, which since has gone missing, reappears on the wall.
INVESTIGATOR
Show me what happened—across all cameras in Paris—to that priceless object…
She points at the painting in the video.
…there.
So, sure, we’re not going to be manipulating time any…uh…time soon, but this pattern can extend beyond magic items a movie.
The scrubber metaphor brings us nearly all the issues we have to consider.
What are the extents of the time frame?
How are they mapped to gestures?
What is the right display?
What about the probabilistic nature of the future?
What are the extents of the time frame?
Think about the mapping issues here. Time goes forever in each direction. But the human wrist can only twist about 270 degrees: 90° pronation (thumb down) and 180° supination (thumb away from the body, or palm up). So how do you map the limited degrees of twist to unlimited time, especially considering that the “upright” hand is anchored to now?
The conceptually simplest mapping would be something like minutes-to-degree, where full pronation of the right hand would go back 90 minutes and full supination 2 hours into the future. (Noting the weirdness that the left hand would be more past-oriented and the right hand more future-oriented.) Let’s call this controlled extents to distinguish it from auto-extents, discussed later.
What if -90/+180 minutes is not enough time to entail the object at hand? Or what if that’s way too much time? The scale of those extents could be modified by a second gesture, such as the distance of the left hand from the right. So when the left hand was very far back, the extents might be -90/+180 years. When the left hand was touching the right, the extents might be -90/+180 milliseconds to find detail in very fast moving events. This kind-of backworlds the gestures seen in the film.
That’s simple and quite powerful, but doesn’t wholly fit the content for a couple of reasons. The first is that the time scales can vary so much between objects. Even -90/+180 years might be insufficient. What if Strange was scrubbing the timeline of a Yareta plant (which can live to be 3,000 years old) or a meteorite? Things exist in greatly differing time scales. To solve that you might just say OK, let’s set the scale to accommodate geologic or astronomic time spans. But now to select meaningfully between the apple and the tome his hand must move mere nanometers and hard for Strange to get right. A logarithmic time scale to that slider control might help, but still only provides precision at the now end of the spectrum.
If you design a thing with arbitrary time mapping you also have to decide what to do when the object no longer exists prior to the time request. If Strange tried to turn the apple back 50 years, what would be shown? How would you help him elegantly focus on the beginning point of the apple and at the same time understand that the apple didn’t exist 50 years ago?
So letting Strange control the extents arbitrarily is either very constrained or quite a bit more complicated than the movie shows.
Could the extents be automatically set per the focus?
Could the extents be set automatically at the beginning and end of the object in question? Those can be fuzzy concepts, but for the apple there are certainly points in time at which we say “definitely a bud and not a fruit” and “definitely inedible decayed biomass.” So those could be its extents.
The extents for the tome are fuzzier. Its beginning might be when its blank vellum pages were bound and its cover decorated. But the future doesn’t have as clean an endpoint. Pages can be torn out. The cover and binding could be removed for a while and the pages scattered, but then mostly brought together with other pages added and rebound. When does it stop being itself? What’s its endpoint? Suddenly the Eye has to have a powerful and philosophically advanced AI just to reconcile Theseus’ paradox for any object it was pointed at, to the satisfaction of the sorcerer using it and in the context in which it was being examined. Not simple and not in evidence.
Auto-extents could also get into very weird mapping. If an object were created last week, each single degree of right-hand-pronation would reverse time by about 2 hours; but if was fated to last a millennium, each single degree of right-hand-supination would advance time by about 5 years. And for the overwhelming bulk of that display, the book wouldn’t change much at all, so the differences in the time mapping between the two would not be apparent to the user and could cause great confusion.
So setting extents automatically is not a simple answer either. But between the two, starting with the extents automatically saves him the work of finding the interesting bits. (Presuming we can solve that tricky end-point problem. Ideas?) Which takes us to the question of the best display, which I’ll cover in the next post.
In the priorthreeposts, I’ve discussed the goods-and-bads of the Eye of Agamotto in the Tibet mode. (I thought I could squeeze the Hong Kong and the Dark Dimension modes into one post, but turns out this one was just too long. keep reading. You’ll see.) In this post we examine a mode that looks like the Tibet mode, but is actually quite different.
Hong Kong mode
Near the film’s climax, Strange uses the Eye to reverse Kaecilius’ destruction of the Hong Kong Sanctum Sanctorum (and much of the surrounding cityscape). In this scene, Kaecilius leaps at Strange, and Strange “freezes” Kaecilius in midair with the saucer. It’s done more quickly, but similarly to how he “freezes” the apple into a controlled-time mode in Tibet.
But then we see something different, and it complicates everything. As Strange twists the saucer counterclockwise, the cityscape around him—not just Kaecilius—begins to reverse slowly. (And unlike in Tibet, the saucer keeps spinning clockwise underneath his hand.) Then the rate of reversal accelerates, and even continues in its reversal after Strange drops his gesture and engages in a fight with Kaecilius, who somehow escapes the reversing time stream to join Strange and Mordo in the “observer” time stream.
So in this mode, the saucer is working much more like a shuttle wheel with no snap-back feature.
A shuttle wheel, as you’ll recall from the first post, doesn’t specify an absolute value along a range like a jog dial does. A shuttle wheel indicates a direction and rate of change. A little to the left is slow reverse. Far to the left is fast reverse. Nearly all of the shuttle wheels we use in the real world have snap-back features, because if you were just going to leave it reversing and pay attention to something else, you might as well use another control to get to the absolute beginning, like a jog dial. But, since Strange is scrubbing an endless “video stream,” (that is, time), and he can pull people and things out of the manipulated-stream and into the observer-stream and do stuff, not having a snap-back makes sense.
For the Tibet mode I argued for a chapter ring to provide some context and information about the range of values he’s scrubbing. So for shuttling along the past in the Hong Kong mode, I don’t think a chapter ring or content overview makes sense, but it would help to know the following.
The rate of change
Direction of change
Shifted datetime
Timedate difference from when he started
In the scene that information is kind of obvious from the environment, so I can see the argument for not having it. But if he was in some largely-unchanging environment, like a panic room or an underground cave or a Sanctum Sanctorum, knowing that information would save him from letting the shuttle go too far and finding himself in the Ordovician. A “home” button might also help to quickly recover from mistakes. Adding these signals would also help distinguish the two modes. They work differently, so they should look different. As it stands, they look identical.
He still (probably) needs future branches
Can Strange scrub the future this way? We don’t see it in the movie. But if so, we have many of the same questions as the Tibet mode future scrubber: Which timeline are we viewing & how probable is it? What other probabilities exist and how does he compare them? This argues for the addition of the future branches from that design.
Selecting the mode
So how does Strange specify the jog dial or shuttle wheel mode?
One cop-out answer is a mental command from Strange. It’s a cop-out because if the Eye responds to mental commands, this whole design exercise is moot, and we’re here to critique, practice, and learn. Not only that, but physical interfaces are more cinegenic, so better to make a concrete interaction for the film.
You might think we could modify the opening finger-tut (see the animated gif, below). But it turns out we need that for another reason: specifying the center and radius-of-effect.
Center and radius-of-effect
In Tibet, the Eye appears to affect just an apple and a tome. But since we see it affecting a whole area in Hong Kong, let’s presume the Eye affects time in a sphere. For the apple and tome, it was affecting a small sphere that included the table, too, it’s just that table didn’t change in the spans of time we see. So if it works in spheres, how is the center and the radius of the sphere set?
Center
Let’s say the Eye does some simple gaze monitoring to find the salient object at his locus of attention. Then it can center the effect on the thing and automatically set the radius of effect to the thing’s size across likely-to-be scrubbed extents. In Tibet, it’s easy. Apple? Check. Tome? Check. In Hong Kong, he’s focusing on the Sanctum, and its image recognition is smart enough to understand the concept of “this building.”
Radius
But the Hong Kong radius stretches out beyond his line of sight, affecting something with a very vague visual and even conceptual definition, that is, “the wrecked neighborhood.” So auto-setting these variables wouldn’t work without reconceiving the Eye as a general artificial intelligence. That would have some massive repercussions throughout the diegesis, so let’s avoid that.
If it’s a manual control, how does he do it? Watch the animated gif above carefully and see he’s got two steps to the “turn Eye on” tut: opening the eye by making an eye shape, and after the aperture opens, spreading his hands apart, or kind of expanding the Eye. In Tibet that spreading motion is slow and close. In Hong it’s faster and farther. That’s enough evidence to say the spread*speed determines the radius. We run into the scales problem of apple-versus-neighborhood that we had in determining the time extents, but make it logarithmic and add some visual feedback and he should be able to pick arbitrary sizes with precision.
So…back to mode selection
So if we’re committing the “turn on” gesture to specifying the center-and-radius, the only other gesture left is the saucer creation. For a quick reminder, here’s how it works in Tibet.
Since the circle works pretty well for a jog dial, let’s leave this for Tibet mode. A contrasting but related gesture would be to have Strange hold his right hand flat, in a sagittal plane, with the palm facing to his left. (See an illustration, below.) Then he can tilt his hand inside the saucer to reverse or fast forward time, and withdraw his hand from the saucer graphic to leave time moving at the adjusted rate. Let the speed of the saucer indicate speed of change. To map to a clock, tilting to the left would reverse time, and tilting to the right would advance it.
How the datetime could be shown is an exercise for the reader.
The yank out
There’s one more function we see twice in the Hong Kong scene. Strange is able to pull Mordo and Wong from the reversing time stream by thrusting the saucer toward them. This is a goofy choice of a gesture that makes no semantic sense. It would make much more sense for Strange to keep his saucer hand extended, and use his left hand to pull them from the reversing stream.
Whew.
So one of the nice things about this movie interface, is that while it doesn’t hold up under the close scrutiny of this blog, the interface to the Eye of Agamotto works while watching the film. Audience sees the apple happen, and gets that gestures + glowing green circle = adjusting time. For that, it works.
That said, we can see improvements that would not affect the script, would not require much more of the actors, and not add too much to post. It could be more consistent and believable.
But we’re not done yet. There’s one other function shown by the Eye of Agamotto when Strange takes it into the Dark Dimension, which is the final mode of the Eye, up next.
We see a completely new mode for the Eye in the Dark Dimension. With a flourish of his right hand over his left forearm, a band of green lines begin orbiting his forearm just below his wrist. (Another orbits just below his elbow, just off-camera in the animated gif.) The band signals that Strange has set this point in time as a “save point,” like in a video game. From that point forward, when he dies, time resets and he is returned here, alive and well, though he and anyone else in the loop is aware that it happened.
In the scene he’s confronting a hostile god-like creature on its own mystical turf, so he dies a lot.
An interesting moment happens when Strange is hopping from the blue-ringed planetoid to the one close to the giant Dormammu face. He glances down at his wrist, making sure that his savepoint was set. It’s a nice tell, letting us know that Strange is a nervous about facing the giant, Galactus-sized primordial evil that is Dormammu. This nervousness ties right into the analysis of this display. If we changed the design, we could put him more at ease when using this life-critical interface.
Initiating gesture
The initiating gesture doesn’t read as “set a savepoint.” This doesn’t show itself as a problem in this scene, but if the gesture did have some sort of semantic meaning, it would make it easier for Strange to recall and perform correctly. Maybe if his wrist twist transitioned from moving splayed fingers to his pointing with his index finger to his wrist…ok, that’s a little too on the nose, so maybe…toward the ground, it would help symbolize the here & now that is the savepoint. It would be easier for Strange to recall and feel assured that he’d done the right thing.
I have questions about the extents of the time loop effect. Is it the whole Dark Dimension? Is it also Earth? Is it the Universe? Is it just a sphere, like the other modes of the Eye? How does he set these? There’s not enough information in the movie to backworld this, but unless the answer is “it affects everything” there seems to be some variables missing in the initiating gesture.
Setpoint-active signal
But where the initiating gesture doesn’t appear to be a problem in the scene, the wrist-glance indicates that the display is. Note that, other than being on the left forearm instead of the right, the bands look identical to the ones in the Tibet and Hong Kong modes. (Compare the Tibet screenshot below.) If Strange is relying on the display to ensure that his savepoint was set, having it look identical is not as helpful as it would be if the visual was unique. “Wait,” he might think, “Am I in the right mode, here?”
In a redesign, I would select an animated display that was not a loop, but an indication that time was passing. It can’t be as literal as a clock of course. But something that used animation to suggest time was progressing linearly from a point. Maybe something like the binary clock from Mission to Mars (see below), rendered in the graphic language of the Eye. Maybe make it base-3 to seem not so technological.
Seeing a display that is still, on invocation—that becomes animated upon initialization—would mean that all he has to do is glance to confirm the unique display is in motion. “Yes, it’s working. I’m in the Groundhog Day mode, and the savepoint is set.”
We’re actually done with all of the artifacts from Doctor Strange. But there’s one last kind-of interface that’s worth talking about, and that’s when Strange assists with surgery on his own body.
After being shot with a soul-arrow by the zealot, Strange is in bad shape. He needs medical attention. He recovers his sling ring and creates a portal to the emergency room where he once worked. Stumbling with the pain, he manages to find Dr. Palmer and tell her he has a cardiac tamponade. They head to the operating theater and get Strange on the table.
When Strange passes out, his “spirit” is ejected from his body as an astral projection. Once he realizes what’s happened, he gathers his wits and turns to observe the procedure.
When Dr. Palmer approaches his body with a pericardiocentesis needle, Strange manifests so she can sense him and recommends that she aim “just a little higher.” At first she is understandably scared, but once he explains what’s happening, she gets back to business, and he acts as a virtual coach.
