Sandmen have a clean-up crew to quickly rid the city’s floors of the unsightly corpses they create when they terminate runners. Logan summons one through the CB function of his SandPhone, telling dispatch, “Runner terminated, 0.31, ready for cleanup.”
Minutes later, Cleanup arrives. This crew floats around the city in a slow-moving hover platforms, that look a little like a vertical knee raise machine with anti-gravity pads and a faulty muffler. The controls aren’t apparent, but the operator maneuvers the platform over the cadaver to spray it with a fast-acting solvent that emits out the base.
This is the surface question of the Cleanup platform interface. If the operators don’t move, how are they controlling the platform? Of course it could be a brain interface, but that’s an easy answer. There are at least three alternative types of input that could explain what we see on screen.
- Force-sensing resistors or strain gauge that read the amount of force being applied to a stationary surface and act accordingly. The grips could be outfitted with force strips for each finger giving a high degree of complex input.
- Gaze interactions, where eye tracking equipment registers glances, blinks, pupil dilation, and eyelid spread over time as controls.
- Subvocal recognition allow a user to move their throat and mouth as if they were speaking, and even without actually producing any sound, register it as speech input.
Each of these technologies permit input via movements that are difficult to detect through observation, but facilitate rich enough input to pilot a personal vehicle through 3D space. Sadly, this level of sensory sophistication is not in evidence anywhere else in the film, so we’ll just have to chalk it up to a nifty tech for our real world toolboxes.
And though these technologies are cool, they don’t answer any of the experience or service design questions from the perspective of the Übercomputer. Why it is good for the operator to appear perfectly still in the first place? Is there some reason why they need to be dehumanized or robotic? It can’t be that they’re doing something horrible. Sandmen do the actual killing (and as we see do it gleefully, cruelly) and are highly visible, clearly human participants in the system?