3 of 3: Brain Hacking

25 Jan 2017 by scifihughf

The hospital doesn’t have the equipment to decrypt and download the actual data. But Jane knows that the LoTeks can, so they drive to the ruined bridge that is the LoTek home base. As mentioned earlier under Door Bombs and Safety Catches the bridge guards nearly kill them due to a poorly designed defensive system. Once again Johnny is not impressed by the people who are supposed to help him.

When Johnny has calmed down, he is introduced to Jones, the LoTek codebreaker who decrypts corporate video broadcasts. Jones is a cyborg dolphin.

Jones has not just an implant like Johnny or an augmented nervous system like Jane, but a full neural brain interface that gives him active control. The thing behind his eye and under the cable can rotate, and he can also direct and control an external microwave radar dish. In the background there are a lot of cables and blinking lights apparently connecting Jones to the LoTek video broadcast gear.

For his part, Johnny is sitting in a chair, upper head strapped into a helmet-like brain scanner. This one is very big and clunky, perhaps because it is salvaged old technology or perhaps because this is not just a passive scanner, so needs additional elements and power to actively modify the brain.

When this starts operating, we see the same strobing white light flashes that the first scanner used.

J-Bone, the LoTek leader, uses a handheld camera to feed the first access code image into the system. This is yet another piece of talking technology, announcing that the first image has been loaded.

The captured image is processed to remove the perspective keystoning, and displayed on one of three small panels on the wall, side by side. That specialised displays are made solely for displaying three images suggests that this form of access code is a standard method of data protection in 2021. The other two panels display rolling static.

Wait…static?

Why is there static in a 2021 system for displaying computer images? It’s not just because they’re analog: old CRT computer monitors went blank if there was nothing to display. This is a missing or scrambled signal.

Since the LoTeks rely on scavenged technology, it’s quite likely that they are the last people on the planet still using coax video cables. Another possibility is that this is a deliberate imitation, as we saw earlier with the digital fax machine that made analog sounds. Computer graphics programmers are constantly wondering whether the screen is black because they didn’t draw anything, or black because they accidently drew everything in that color. The rolling static makes it clear that there is no image to display, not that the image is blank.

The first download attempt is interrupted by the Yakuza attacking the bridge. There’s some equipment damage, but by the end of the fight Johnny and company have recovered the second access code image.

Still not enough, but Johnny now attempts to “hack his own brain” which is successful (discussed below). The data is finally downloaded and the LoTeks broadcast the cure for NAS worldwide.

Tech Tease

The hacking and downloading take place in another virtual reality space, the internal representation of the implant. These sequences are action-packed and filled with eye catching visuals. If we wanted, there’s much that could be written about, from the visual representations of hacking used in film and TV to the advisability of transmitting vital scientific data through a video encoder. But we never get to see the interface!

Instead, we see Johnny just sit and do nothing other than maintain a death grip on the chair armrests and try not to grind his teeth into fragments. According to the running commentary on the hack provided by J-Bone, Johnny is performing actions in VR. It’s possible that the LoTek brain scanner is a true brain interface that gives him active control by thought alone with no sound or audio experience.

But this is evidently high grade encryption, which could only be broken by an expert hacker. Without visible controls for the brain scanner, the expert hacker would need to be using a direct brain interface. And the hacker would naturally have their own avatar. The only person present who definitely meets all these requirements is not Johnny, but Jones.

Could Jones be really doing all the work? In the original short story it was Jones, and here he’s certainly doing something in virtual reality. Johnny would make a useful distraction, and J-Bone might deliberately mislead the non-LoTek bystanders to keep Jones a secret.

Whether it’s Johnny or Jones, we only get to see what happens, not how. Rather than end on this disappointing note, I’ll now jump back to discuss the more rewarding interfaces for phone calls and cyberspace search sequence.

High Tech Binoculars

11 Jan 2017 by scifihughf

In Johnny Mnemonic we see two different types of binoculars with augmented reality overlays and other enhancements: Yakuz-oculars, and LoTek-oculars.

Yakuz-oculars

The Yakuza are the last to be seen but also the simpler of the two. They look just like a pair of current day binoculars, but this is the view when the leader surveys the LoTek bridge.

I assume that the characters here are Japanese? Anyone?

In the centre is a fixed-size green reticule. At the bottom right is what looks like the magnification factor. At the top left and bottom left are numbers, using Western digits, that change as the binoculars move. Without knowing what the labels are I can only guess that they could be azimuth and elevation angles, or distance and height to the centre of the reticule. (The latter implies some sort of rangefinder.)

So far, this is a simple uncluttered display. But why is there a brightly glowing Pharmakom logo at the top right? It blocks part of the view, and probably doesn’t help anyone trying to keep their eyes adapted for night vision.

LoTek-oculars

The LoTeks, despite their name, have more impressive binoculars. They’re first used when Johnny gets out of his airport taxi.

There’s a third tube above the optics, a rectangular inlet, and an antenna.

In these binoculars, the augmented reality overlay is much more dynamic. Instead of a fixed circle, green lines converge in a bounding box around the image of Johnny. Text slides onto the display from left to right, the last line turning yellow.

Zoomrect

The animated transition of the bounding box resembles what Classic MacOS programmers of the 1990s called “zoomrects” used for showing windows opening or closing. It’s a very effective technique to draw attention to a particular area of an image.

Animated text

Text appearing character by character is ubiquitous in film interfaces. In the 1960s and 1970s mainframe and minicomputer terminals really did display incrementally, as the characters arrived one by one over slow serial port links. On any more recent computer it actually takes extra programming to achieve this effect, as the normal display of text is so fast that we would perceive it as instantaneous. But people like to see incremental text, or have been conditioned by film to expect it, so why not?

Bioscanning

The binoculars detect Johnny’s implant. It might just be possible to detect this passively from infrared or electronic signals, but more likely the binoculars include a high resolution microwave radar as well. If there had been more than one person in view, the bounding box would indicate which one the text refers to. And note that the last line of text is a different color. What that means is unclear here, but it becomes clear (and I’ll discuss it) later.

The second time we see the LoTek binoculars is when a lookout spots Street Preacher, a very bad guy and another who wants to remove Johnny’s head. Once again the binoculars have performed more than just a visual scan.

The binocular view and overlay are being relayed to another character, the LoTek leader J-Bone who can watch on a monitor. Here the film anticipates the WiFi webcam.

The overlay text now changes.

Narrow AI?

This is interesting, because the binoculars can not only detect implants and other cyborg modifications, but are apparently able to evaluate and offer advice. It appears that the green text is used for the factual (more or less) information about what has been detected, while yellow text is uncertain or or speculative.

Does this imply a general artificial intelligence? Not necessarily. This warning could be based solely on the detected signature, in the same way that current day military passive sonars and radar warning receivers can identify threats based on identifying characteristics of a received signal. In the world of Johnny Mnemonic it would make sense to assume that anyone with full custom biomechanics is extremely dangerous. Or, since Street Preacher is a resident rather than a stranger and already feared by others, his appearance and the warning could have been entered into a LoTek facial recognition database that the binocular system uses as a reference.

These textual overlays are an excellent interface, not interfering with normal vision and providing a fast and easy-to-understand analysis. But, the user must have faith that the computer analysis is accurate. There’s no reason given as to why any of the text is displayed. If Johnny was carrying an implant in his pocket instead of his brain, would the computer know the difference?

An alternative approach would be some kind of sensor fusion or false spectrum display, with the raw infrared or radar image overlaid over the visuals and the viewer responsible for interpreting the data. The problem with such systems is that our visual system didn’t evolve to interpret such imagery, so a lot of training and practice is required to be both fast and accurate. And the overlay itself interferes with our normal visual recognition and processing. If the computer can do a better job of deciphering the meaning of non-visual data, it should do so and summarise for the human viewer.

Further advantages of this interface are that even a novice sentry will benefit from the built-in scanning and threat analysis, and the wireless transmission ensures that the information is shared rather than being limited to the person on watch.

J.D.E.M. LEVEL 5

8 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The first computer interface we see in the film occurs at 3:55. It’s an interface for housing and monitoring the tesseract, a cube that is described in the film as “an energy source” that S.H.I.E.L.D. plans to use to “harness energy from space.” We join the cube after it has unexpectedly and erratically begun to throw off low levels of gamma radiation.

The harnessing interface consists of a housing, a dais at the end of a runway, and a monitoring screen.

Avengers-cubemonitoring-07 — Fury walks past the dais they erected *just because*.

The housing & dais

The harness consists of a large circular housing that holds the cube and exposes one face of it towards a long runway that ends in a dais. Diegetically this is meant to be read more as engineering than interface, but it does raise questions. For instance, if they didn’t already know it was going to teleport someone here, why was there a dais there at all, at that exact distance, with stairs leading up to it? How’s that harnessing energy? Wouldn’t you expect a battery at the far end? If they did expect a person as it seems they did, then the whole destroying swaths of New York City thing might have been avoided if the runway had ended instead in the Hulk-holding cage that we see later in the film. So…you know…a considerable flaw in their unknown-passenger teleportation landing strip design. Anyhoo, the housing is also notable for keeping part of the cube visible to users near it, and holding it at a particular orientation, which plays into the other component of the harness—the monitor.

The monitor

In the underground laboratory, an (unnamed?) technician warns lead scientist Selvig that, “it’s spiking again,” and the camera pans down to this monitoring interface.

Header

The header is a static barcode followed by the initialism J.D.E.M. along with its full name, the Joint Dark Energy Mission. (Sounds super cool and sci-fi, right? Turns out it is a real program between NASA and the US DOE.) Another label across the top identifies the screen as LEVEL 5 and that it belongs to PROJECT PEGASUS and NASA.

3D map

A main display shows a 3D wireframe of the tesseract, with color-coded nebula-like shapes within the cube. The wireframe (and most of the text on screen) are a bright cyan, with internal features progressing in color from the cyan through white to a blood red, all the way to lens flares near the most active areas in the cube. The color choices make for a quick read of what is “cool” and what is “hot,” so are effective for being immediate, but if the lens flares are designed into the system to indicate peakness, it’s a bad choice for obscuring other data in the display.

Note that the wireframe of the cube is also rotating slightly, which is very helpful for a user to more fully understand 3D information from a 2D screen. It might be even better mapping with less cognitive load if the display was a volumetric projection. (VPs exist within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but so far I believe we’ve only ever seen them in Tony Stark’s possession so perhaps he has not released it to the outside world.) Hopefully in its rotation on this monitor it does not rotate in 360°, as the regularness of the cube would make it difficult to understand where an internal anomaly might exist in the real thing. Hopefully the wireframe only wavers back and forth within a few degrees, and is oriented in roughly the same way an observer glancing at the real thing would see it in the housing, to allow for instant mapping of problem areas.

Warning

Just to the left of the 3D map is a data monitoring panel. Its top label blinks a red WARNING CRITICAL ENERGY LEVELS and a percentage readout. The panel also features a key whose colors match those of the map. (As it should.) Hopefully a microinteraction allows a user to touch any part of the map, freeze the rotation, and get the percentage details of the touched point. A detail box wavers its vertical position along the key to provide a user a quick assessment of its value, and also contains a percentage readout for precision. Judging by the position of the box and the readout, it looks like the 100% mark is about halfway up the screen. Hopefully the upper part of the scale is logarithmic to accommodate massive surges in values.

Additional elements of the display include several scrolling waveforms and text boxes with inscrutable data and labels. It’s easy to imagine these as useful (say total energy values for specific electromagnetic frequencies) but they’re difficult to read, so difficult to formally evaluate.

All told, a nice display (per some assumptions) for monitoring what’s happening with the cube.

Now if only they had applied that solid design thinking to that dais vs. cage problem.

Krell technology

9 Oct 2012 by Christopher Noessel

Morbius is the inheritor of a massive underground complex of technology once belonging to a race known as the Krell. As Morbius explains, “In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty and noble race of beings which called themselves the Krell.”

Morbius tours Adams and Doc through the Krell technopolis.

“Ethically as well as technologically, they were a million years ahead of humankind; for in unlocking the mysteries of nature they had conquered even their baser selves seemingly on the threshold of some supreme accomplishment which was to have crowned their entire history, this all but divine race perished in a single night.

“In the centuries since that unexplained catastrophe even their cloud-piercing towers of glass and porcelain and adamantine steel have crumbled back into the soil of Altair, and nothing—absolutely nothing—remains above ground.”

Despite this advancement, unless we ascribe to the Krell some sort of extra sensory perception and control, much of the technology we see has serious design flaws.

Morbius plays half-a-million-year-old Krell music.

The first piece of technology is a Krell recorded-music player, which Morbius keeps on the desk in his study. The small cylindrical device stands upright, bulging slighty around its middle. It is made of a gray metal, with a translucent pink band just below the middle. A hollow button sits on top.

The cylinder rests in a clear plastic base, with small, identical metal slugs sitting upright in recessions evenly spaced around it. To initiate music playback, Morbius picks one of the slugs and inserts it into the hollow of the button. He then depresses the momentary button once. The pink translucent band illuminates, and music begins to flow from unseen speakers around the office.

Modern audiences have a good deal of experience with music players, and so the device raises a great many questions. How does a user know which slug relates to what music? The slugs all look the same so this seems difficult at best. How does a user eject the slug? If by upending the device, one hopes that the cylinder comes free from the base easily, or the other slugs will all fall out as well. It must have impressed audiences to see music contained in such small containers, but otherwise the device is more attractive than usable.

Morbius inputs the combination to open the door.

Many Krell doors are protected by a combination lock. The mechanism stands high enough that Morbius can easily reach out and operate it. Its large circular face has four white triangles printed on its surface at the cardinal points, and other geometric red and yellow markings around the remainder. A four-spoke handle is anchored to a swivel joint at the center of the face. To unlock the door, a user twists the handle such that one of its spokes lines up with the north point, and then angles the handle to touch the spoke to the triangle there, before returning the handle to a neutral angle and twisting to the next position in the combination. When the sequence is complete, the triangles, the tips of the spokes, and a large ring around the face all light up and blink as the two-plane aperture doors slide open.

Even Walter Pigeon has trouble making sense of this awkward device. There appear to be no snap-to affordances for the neutral angle of the handle or the cardinal orientations, leaving the user unsure if each step in the sequence has been received correctly. Additionally, if the combination consists of particular spokes at this one point, why are the spokes undifferentiated? If the combination consists of pointing to different triangles, why are there four spokes instead of one? Is familiarity with some subtle cue part of the security measures?

Morbius shares operation of the Krell encyclopedia.

All of Krell wisdom and knowledge is contained in a device that Morbius shows to Adams and Doc. It consists of an underlit scroll of material sliding beneath a rectangular hole cut in the surface of a table. To illuminate it, Morbius turns one of the two ridged green dials located to the left of the screen about 45 degrees clockwise. To move the scroll, Morbius turns the other green dial clockwise as well.

Why is the least frequently used dial, i.e. the power button, closer than the more frequently used button, i.e. the scroll wheel? This requires the reader to be stretched awkwardly. Why is the on-off dial free spinning? There appear to be only two states: lit and unlit. The dial should have two states as well. If the content of the pages is discretely chunked into pages, it would also argue for a click-stop rather than free-spinning dial as well, but we do not get a good look at the scroll contents. One might also question the value of a scroll as the organizing method for a vast body of information, since related bits of information may be distractingly far apart.

Sci-fi interfaces

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