Tag Archives: pattern

Cyberspace: Newark Copyshop

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The transition from Beijing to the Newark copyshop is more involved. After he travels around a bit, he realizes he needs to be looking back in Newark. He “rewinds” using a pull gesture and sees the copyshop’s pyramid. First there is a predominantly blue window that unfolds as if it were paper.

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And then the copyshop initial window expands. Like the Beijing hotel, this is a floor plan view, but unlike the hotel it stays two dimensional. It appears that cyberspace works like the current world wide web, with individual servers for each location that can choose what appearance to present to visitors.

Johnny again selects data records, but not with a voice command. The first transition is a window that not only expands but spins as it does so, and makes a strange jump at the end from the centre to the upper left.

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Once again Johnny uses the two-handed expansion gesture to see the table view of the records. Continue reading →

Surface Scan

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Later in the scene General Staedert orders a “thermonucleatic imaging.” The planet swallows it up. Then Staedert orders an “upfront loading of a 120-ZR missile” and in response to the order, the planet takes a preparatory defensive stance, armoring up like a pillbug. The scanner screens reflect this with a monitoring display.

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In contrast to the prior screen for the Gravity (?) Scan, these screens make some sense. They show:

  • A moving pattern on the surface of a sphere slowing down
  • clear Big Label indications when those variables hit an important threshold, which is in this case 0
  • A summary assessment, “ZERO SURFACE ACTIVITY”
  • A key on the left identifying what the colors and patterns mean
  • Some sciency scatter plots on the right

The majority of these would directly help someone monitoring the planet for its key variables.

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Though these are useful, it would be even more useful if the system would help track these variables not just when they hit a threshold, but how they are trending. Waveforms like the type used in medical monitoring of the “MOVEMENT LOCK,” “DYNAMIC FLOW,” and “DATA S C A T” might help the operator see a bit into the future rather than respond after the fact.

Chat follow-up: Ultimate Weapon Against Evil & Constraints

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The live chat of the O’Reilly webinar that Christopher delivered on 18 April 2013 had some great questions, but not all of them made it out of the chat room and onto the air. I’m taking a short break from the release of the sci-fi survey to answer some of those questions.

Q: Dennis Ward asks: There’s a gaff in The Fifth Element scene referenced—Corbin Dallas places one of the stones upsidedown relative to the other three. Is that a constraint issue?

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Yes and no.

Yes, if the stones could be placed on their pedestals in the wrong way. You wouldn’t want to design the weapon such that that were possible. As we saw, seconds count, and the stakes are pretty high. (c.f. Ultimate Evil.) Constraints, as Don Norman defined them in The Design of Everyday Things, would be one way to fix that. For example, you could widen one end of the stones so they were too large to fit in the pedestal the wrong way.

But (and here’s the “no”) it turns out that in The Ultimate Weapon Against Evil, the stones work whichever way they’re inserted. Take a look at the scene and though the stones aren’t all oriented the same way, i.e. pattern- or smooth-side up, they all work. (There is a third possibility, that orientation does matter, but they just got lucky in orienting them correctly. The odds of getting this right the first time is just over 6%, so we can discount this.)

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This is a superior design solution since it eliminates the need for the user to worry about orientation. Let’s call the pattern Make Orientation a Non-Issue.

But wait, we’re not done. We shouldn’t disregard the fact that you perceived it as a gaff. The design of the object signaled to you that there was an orientation that mattered. So yes, let’s keep the stones the same basic shape such that orientation is a non-issue, but one small improvement would be to have the visual design match the interaction design: The patterns should be symmetrical, perhaps completely covering each long side of the stones. That way, anyone wondering how they fit the pedestals wouldn’t falsely perceive that there is an orientation issue when there really isn’t one.

Thanks for this question, by the way. The Fifth Element is one of the first I reviewed for the Make It So survey since it’s one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time. It makes me want to post that one next. I’ve got other plans, though, so perhaps after that. 🙂

UPDATE ————————————–

Since writing this post, I’ve done deeper analysis on this topic. See the Pilot episode of Sci Fi University for an even better and more thorough answer to this question.