VID-PHŌN

18 May 2020 by Christopher Noessel

At around the midpoint of the movie, Deckard calls Rachel from a public videophone in a vain attempt to get her to join him in a seedy bar. Let’s first look at the device, then the interactions, and finally take a critical eye to this thing.

The panel

The lower part of the panel is a set of back-lit instructions and an input panel, which consists of a standard 12-key numeric input and a “start” button. Each of these momentary pushbuttons are back-lit white and have a red outline.

In the middle-right of the panel we see an illuminated orange logo panel, bearing the Saul Bass Bell System logo and the text reading, “VID-PHŌN” in some pale yellow, custom sans-serif logotype. The line over the O, in case you are unfamiliar, is a macron, indicating that the vowel below should be pronounced as a long vowel, so the brand should be pronounced “vid-phone” not “vid-fahn.”

In the middle-left there is a red “transmitting” button (in all lower case, a rarity) and a black panel that likely houses the camera and microphone. The transmitting button is dark until he interacts with the 12-key input, see below.

At the top of the panel, a small cathode-ray tube screen at face height displays data before and after the call as well as the live video feed during the call. All the text on the CRT is in a fixed-width typeface. A nice bit of worldbuilding sees this screen covered in Sharpie graffiti.

The interaction

His interaction is straightforward. He approaches the nook and inserts a payment card. In response, the panel—including its instructions and buttons—illuminates. A confirmation of the card holder’s identity appears in the in the upper left of the CRT, i.e. “Deckard, R.,” along with his phone number, “555-6328” (Fun fact: if you misdialed those last four numbers you might end up talking to the Ghostbusters) and some additional identifying numbers.

A red legend at the bottom of the CRT prompts him to “PLEASE DIAL.” It is outlined with what look like ASCII box-drawing characters. He presses the START button and then dials “555-7583” on the 12-key. As soon as the first number is pressed, the “transmitting” button illuminates. As he enters digits, they are simultaneously displayed for him on screen.

His hands are not in-frame as he commits the number and the system calls Rachel. So whether he pressed an enter key, #, or *; or the system just recognizes he’s entered seven digits is hard to say.

After their conversation is complete, her live video feed goes blank, and TOTAL CHARGE $1.25, is displayed for his review.

Chapter 10 of the book Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction is dedicated to Communication, and in this post I’ll use the framework I developed there to review the VID-PHŌN, with one exception: this device is public and Deckard has to pay to use it, so he has to specify a payment method, and then the system will report back total charges. That wasn’t in the original chapter and in retrospect, it should have been.

Ergonomics

Turns out this panel is just the right height for Deckard. How do people of different heights or seated in a wheelchair fare? It would be nice if it had some apparent ability to adjust for various body heights. Similarly, I wonder how it might work for differently-abled users, but of course in cinema we rarely get to closely inspect devices for such things.

Activating

Deckard has to insert a payment card before the screen illuminates. It’s nice that the activation entails specifying payment, but how would someone new to the device know to do this? At the very least there should be some illuminated call to action like “insert payment card to begin,” or better yet some iconography so there is no language dependency. Then when the payment card was inserted, the rest of the interface can illuminate and act as a sort of dial-tone that says, “OK, I’m listening.”

Specifying a recipient: Unique Identifier

In Make It So, I suggest five methods of specifying a recipient: fixed connection, operator, unique identifier, stored contacts, and global search. Since this interaction is building on the experience of using a 1982 public pay phone, the 7-digit identifier quickly helps audiences familiar with American telephone standards understand what’s happening. So even if Scott had foreseen the phone explosion that led in 1994 to the ten-digit-dialing standard, or the 2053 events that led to the thirteen-digital-dialing standard, it would have likely have confused audiences. So it would have slightly risked the read of this scene. It’s forgivable.

Page 204–205 in the PDF and dead tree versions.

I have a tiny critique over the transmitting button. It should only turn on once he’s finished entering the phone number. That way they’re not wasting bandwidth on his dialing speed or on misdials. Let the user finish, review, correct if they need to, and then send. But, again, this is 1982 and direct entry is the way phones worked. If you misdialed, you had to hang up and start over again. Still, I don’t think having the transmitting light up after he entered the 7th digit would have caused any viewers to go all hruh?

There are important privacy questions to displaying a recipient’s number in a way that any passer-by can see. Better would have been to mount the input and the contact display on a transverse panel where he could enter and confirm it with little risk of lookie-loos and identity theives.

Audio & Video

Hopefully, when Rachel received the call, she was informed who it was and that the call was coming from a public video phone. Hopefully it also provided controls for only accepting the audio, in case she was not camera-ready, but we don’t see things from her side in this scene.

Gaze correction is usually needed in video conversation systems since each participant naturally looks at the center of the screen and not at the camera lens mounted somewhere next to its edge. Unless the camera is located in the center of the screen (or the other person’s image on the screen), people would not be “looking” at the other person as is almost always portrayed. Instead, their gaze would appear slightly off-screen. This is a common trope in cinema, but one which we’re become increasingly literate in, as many of us are working from home much more and gaining experience with videoconferencing systems, so it’s beginning to strain suspension of disbelief.

Also how does the sound work here? It’s a noisy street scene outside of a cabaret. Is it a directional mic and directional speaker? How does he adjust the volume if it’s just too loud? How does it remain audible yet private? Small directional speakers that followed his head movements would be a lovely touch.

And then there’s video privacy. If this were the real world, it would be nice if the video had a privacy screen filter. That would have the secondary effect of keeping his head in the right place for the camera. But that is difficult to show cinemagentically, so wouldn’t work for a movie.

Ending the call

Rachel leans forward to press a button on her home video phone end her part of the call. Presumably Deckard has a similar button to press on his end as well. He should be able to just yank his card out, too.

The closing screen is a nice touch, though total charges may not be the most useful thing. Are VID-PHŌN calls a fixed price? Then this information is not really of use to him after the call as much as it is beforehand. If the call has a variable cost, depending on long distance and duration, for example, then he would want to know the charges as the call is underway, so he can wrap things up if it’s getting too expensive. (Admittedly the Bell System wouldn’t want that, so it’s sensible worldbuilding to omit it.) Also if this is a pre-paid phone card, seeing his remaining balance would be more useful.

But still, the point was that total charges of $1.25 was meant to future-shocked audiences of the time, since public phone charges in the United States at the time were $0.10. His remaining balance wouldn’t have shown that and not had the desired effect. Maybe both? It might have been a cool bit of worldbuilding and callback to build on that shock to follow that outrageous price with “Get this call free! Watch a video of life in the offworld colonies! Press START and keep your eyes ON THE SCREEN.”

Because the world just likes to hurt Deckard.

8 Reasons The Voight-Kampff Machine is shit (and a redesign to fix it)

10 Dec 2019 by Christopher Noessel

Distinguishing replicants from humans is a tricky business. Since they are indistinguishable biologically, it requires an empathy test, during which the subject hears empathy-eliciting scenarios and watched carefully for telltale signs such as, “capillary dilation—the so-called blush response…fluctuation of the pupil…involuntary dilation of the iris.” To aid the blade runner in this examination, they use a portable machine called the Voight-Kampff machine, named, presumably, for its inventors.

The device is the size of a thick laptop computer, and rests flat on the table between the blade runner and subject. When the blade runner prepares the machine for the test, they turn it on, and a small adjustable armature rises from the machine, the end of which is an intricate piece of hardware, housing a powerful camera, glowing red.

The blade runner trains this camera on one of the subject’s eyes. Then, while reading from the playbook book of scenarios, they keep watch on a large monitor, which shows an magnified image of the subject’s eye. (Ostensibly, anyway. More on this below.) A small bellows on the subject’s side of the machine raises and lowers. On the blade runner’s side of the machine, a row of lights reflect the volume of the subject’s speech. Three square, white buttons sit to the right of the main monitor. In Leon’s test we see Holden press the leftmost of the three, and the iris in the monitor becomes brighter, illuminated from some unseen light source. The purpose of the other two square buttons is unknown. Two smaller monochrome monitors sit to the left of the main monitor, showing moving but otherwise inscrutable forms of information.

In theory, the system allows the blade runner to more easily watch for the minute telltale changes in the eye and blush response, while keeping a comfortable social distance from the subject. Substandard responses reveal a lack of empathy and thereby a high probability that the subject is a replicant. Simple! But on review, it’s shit. I know this is going to upset fans, so let me enumerate the reasons, and then propose a better solution.

-2. Wouldn’t a genetic test make more sense?

If the replicants are genetically engineered for short lives, wouldn’t a genetic test make more sense? Take a drop of blood and look for markers of incredibly short telomeres or something.

-1. Wouldn’t an fMRI make more sense?

An fMRI would reveal empathic responses in the inferior frontal gyrus, or cognitive responses in the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus. (The brain structures responsible for these responses.) Certinaly more expensive, but more certain.

0. Wouldn’t a metal detector make more sense?

If you are testing employees to detect which ones are the murdery ones and which ones aren’t, you might want to test whether they are bringing a tool of murder with them. Because once they’re found out, they might want to murder you. This scene should be rewritten such that Leon leaps across the desk and strangles Holden, IMHO. It would make him, and other blade runners, seem much more feral and unpredictable.

(OK, those aren’t interface issues but seriously wtf. Onward.)

1. Labels, people

Controls needs labels. Especially when the buttons have no natural affordance and the costs of experimentation to discover the function are high. Remembering the functions of unlabeled controls adds to the cognitive load for a user who should be focusing on the person across the table. At least an illuminated button helps signal the state, so that, at least, is something.

2. It should be less intimidating

The physical design is quite intimidating: The way it puts a barrier in between the blade runner and subject. The fact that all the displays point away from the subject. The weird intricacy of the camera, its ominous HAL-like red glow. Regular readers may note that the eyepiece is red-on-black and pointy. That is to say, it is aposematic. That is to say, it looks evil. That is to say, intimidating.

I’m no emotion-scientist, but I’m pretty sure that if you’re testing for empathy, you don’t want to complicate things by introducing intimidation into the equation. Yes, yes, yes, the machine works by making the subject feel like they have to defend themselves from the accusations in the ethical dilemmas, but that stress should come from the content, not the machine.

2a. Holden should be less intimidating and not tip his hand

While we’re on this point, let me add that Holden should be less intimidating, too. When Holden tells Leon that a tortoise and a turtle are the same thing, (Narrator: They aren’t) he happens to glance down at the machine. At that moment, Leon says, “I’ve never seen a turtle,” a light shines on the pupil and the iris contracts. Holden sees this and then gets all “ok, replicant” and becomes hostile toward Leon.

In case it needs saying: If you are trying to tell whether the person across from you is a murderous replicant, and you suddenly think the answer is yes, you do not tip your hand and let them know what you know. Because they will no longer have a reason to hide their murderyness. Because they will murder you, and then escape, to murder again. That’s like, blade runner 101, HOLDEN.

3. It should display history

The glance moment points out another flaw in the interface. Holden happens to be looking down at the machine at that moment. If he wasn’t paying attention, he would have missed the signal. The machine needs to display the interview over time, and draw his attention to troublesome moments. That way, when his attention returns to the machine, he can see that something important happened, even if it’s not happening now, and tell at a glance what the thing was.

4. It should track the subject’s eyes

Holden asks Leon to stay very still. But people are bound to involuntarily move as their attention drifts to the content of the empathy dilemmas. Are we going to add noncompliance-guilt to the list of emotional complications? Use visual recognition algorithms and high-resolution cameras to just track the subject’s eyes no matter how they shift in their seat.

5. Really? A bellows?

The bellows doesn’t make much sense either. I don’t believe it could, at the distance it sits from the subject, help detect “capillary dilation” or “ophthalmological measurements”. But it’s certainly creepy and Terry Gilliam-esque. It adds to the pointless intimidation.

6. It should show the actual subject’s eye

The eye color that appears on the monitor (hazel) matches neither Leon’s (a striking blue) or Rachel’s (a rich brown). Hat tip to Typeset in the Future for this observation. His is a great review.

7. It should visualize things in ways that make it easy to detect differences in key measurements

Even if the inky, dancing black blob is meant to convey some sort of information, the shape is too organic for anyone to make meaningful readings from it. Like seriously, what is this meant to convey?

The spectrograph to the left looks a little more convincing, but it still requires the blade runner to do all the work of recognizing when things are out of expected ranges.

8. The machine should, you know, help them

The machine asks its blade runner to do a lot of work to use it. This is visual work and memory work and even work estimating when things are out of norms. But this is all something the machine could help them with. Fortunately, this is a tractable problem, using the mighty powers of logic and design.

Pupillary diameter

People are notoriously bad at estimating the sizes of things by sight. Computers, however, are good at it. Help the blade runner by providing a measurement of the thing they are watching for: pupillary diameter. (n.b. The script speaks of both iris constriction and pupillary diameter, but these are the same thing.) Keep it convincing and looking cool by having this be an overlay on the live video of the subject’s eye.

So now there’s some precision to work with. But as noted above, we don’t want to burden the user’s memory with having to remember stuff, and we don’t want them to just be glued to the screen, hoping they don’t miss something important. People are terrible at vigilance tasks. Computers are great at them. The machine should track and display the information from the whole session.

Note that the display illustrates radius, but displays diameter. That buys some efficiencies in the final interface.

Now, with the data-over-time, the user can glance to see what’s been happening and a precise comparison of that measurement over time. But, tracking in detail, we quickly run out of screen real estate. So let’s break the display into increments with differing scales.

There may be more useful increments, but microseconds and seconds feel pretty convincing, with the leftmost column compressing gradually over time to show everything from the beginning of the interview. Now the user has a whole picture to look at. But this still burdens them into noticing when these measurements are out of normal human ranges. So, let’s plot the threshold, and note when measurements fall outside of that. In this case, it feels right that replicants display less that normal pupillary dilation, so it’s a lower-boundary threshold. The interface should highlight when the measurement dips below this.

Blush

I think that covers everything for the pupillary diameter. The other measurement mentioned in the dialogue is capillary dilation of the face, or the “so-called blush response.” As we did for pupillary diameter, let’s also show a measurement of the subject’s skin temperature over time as a line chart. (You might think skin color is a more natural measurement, but for replicants with a darker skin tone than our two pasty examples Leon and Rachel, temperature via infrared is a more reliable metric.) For visual interest, let’s show thumbnails from the video. We can augment the image with degree-of-blush. Reduce the image to high contrast grayscale, use visual recognition to isolate the face, and then provide an overlay to the face that illustrates the degree of blush.

But again, we’re not just looking for blush changes. No, we’re looking for blush compared to human norms for the test. It would look different if we were looking for more blushing in our subject than humans, but since the replicants are less empathetic than humans, we would want to compare and highlight measurements below a threshold. In the thumbnails, the background can be colored to show the median for expected norms, to make comparisons to the face easy. (Shown in the drawing to the right, below.) If the face looks too pale compared to the norm, that’s an indication that we might be looking at a replicant. Or a psychopath.

So now we have solid displays that help the blade runner detect pupillary diameter and blush over time. But it’s not that any diameter changes or blushing is bad. The idea is to detect whether the subject has less of a reaction than norms to what the blade runner is saying. The display should be annotating what the blade runner has said at each moment in time. And since human psychology is a complex thing, it should also track video of the blade runner’s expressions as well, since, as we see above, not all blade runners are able to maintain a poker face. HOLDEN.

Anyway, we can use the same thumbnail display of the face, without augmentation. Below that we can display the waveform (because they look cool), and speech-to-text the words that are being spoken. To ensure that the blade runner’s administration of the text is not unduly influencing the results, let’s add an overlay to the ideal intonation targets. Despite evidence in the film, let’s presume Holden is a trained professional, and he does not stray from those targets, so let’s skip designing the highlight and recourse-for-infraction for now.

Finally, since they’re working from a structured script, we can provide a “chapter” marker at the bottom for easy reference later.

Now we can put it all together, and it looks like this. One last thing we can do to help the blade runner is to highlight when all the signals indicate replicant-ness at once. This signal can’t be too much, or replicants being tested would know from the light on the blade runner’s face when their jig is up, and try to flee. Or murder. HOLDEN.

For this comp, I added a gray overlay to the column where pupillary and blush responses both indicated trouble. A visual designer would find some more elegant treatment.

If we were redesigning this from scratch, we could specify a wide display to accomodate this width. But if we are trying to squeeze this display into the existing prop from the movie, here’s how we could do it.

Note the added labels for the white squares. I picked some labels that would make sense in the context. “Calibrate” and “record” should be obvious. The idea behind “mark” is an easy button for the blade runner to press when they see something that looks weird, like when doctors manually annotate cardiograph output.

Lying to Leon

There’s one more thing we can add to the machine that would help out, and that’s a display for the subject. Recall the machine is meant to test for replicant-ness, which happens to equate to murdery-ness. A positive result from the machine needs to be handled carefully so what happens to Holden in the movie doesn’t happen. I mentioned making the positive-overlay subtle above, but we can also make a placebo display on the subject’s side of the interface.

The visual hierarchy of this should make the subject feel like its purpose is to help them, but the real purpose is to make them think that everything’s fine. Given the script, I’d say a teleprompt of the empathy dilemma should take up the majority of this display. Oh, they think, this is to help me understand what’s being said, like a closed caption. Below the teleprompt, at a much smaller scale, a bar at the bottom is the real point.

On the left of this bar, a live waveform of the audio in the room helps the subject know that the machine is testing things live. In the middle, we can put one of those bouncy fuiget displays that clutters so many sci-fi interfaces. It’s there to be inscrutable, but convince the subject that the machine is really sophisticated. (Hey, a diegetic fuiget!) Lastly—and this is the important part—An area shows that everything is “within range.” This tells the subject that they can be at ease. This is good for the human subject, because they know they’re innocent. And if it’s a replicant subject, this false comfort protects the blade runner from sudden murder. This test might flicker or change occasionally to something ambiguous like “at range,” to convey that it is responding to real world input, but it would never change to something incriminating.

This way, once the blade runner has the data to confirm that the subject is a replicant, they can continue to the end of the module as if everything was normal, thank the replicant for their time, and let them leave the room believing they passed the test. Then the results can be sent to the precinct and authorizations returned so retirement can be planned with the added benefit of the element of surprise.

OK

Look, I’m sad about this, too. The Voight-Kampff machine is cool. It fits very well within the art direction of the Blade Runner universe. This coolness burned the machine into my memory when I saw this film the first dozen times, but despite that, it just doesn’t stand up to inspection. It’s not hopeless, but does need a lot of thinkwork and design to make it really fit to task, and convincing to us in the audience.

Colossus Video Phones

14 Oct 2019 by Christopher Noessel

Throughout Colossus: The Forbin Project, characters talk to one another over video phones. This is a favorite sci-fi interface trope of mine. And though we’ve seen it many times, in the interest of completeness, I’ll review these, too.

The first time we see one in use is early in the film when Forbin calls his team in the Central Programming Office (Forbin calls it the CPO) from the Presidential press briefing (remember those?) where Colossus is being announced to the public. We see an unnamed character in the CPO receiving a telephone call, and calling for quiet amongst the rowdy, hip party of computer scientists. This call is received on a wall-tethered 2500 desk phone.

We cut away to the group reaction, and by the time the camera is back on the video phone, Forbin’s image is peering through the glass. We do not get to see the interactions which switched the mode from telephony to videotelephony.

But we can see two nice touches in the wall-mounted interface.

First, there is a dome camera mounted above the screen. Most sci-fi videophones fall into the Screen-Is-Camera trope, so this is nice to see. It could mounted closer to the screen to avoid gaze misalignment that plagues such systems.

One of the illustrations from the book I’m still quite proud of, for its explanatory power and nerdiness. Chapter 4, Volumetric Projection, Page 83.

Second, there is a 12-key numeric keypad mounted to the wall below the screen. (0–9 as well as an asterisk and octothorp.) This keypad is kind-of nice in that it hints that there is some interface for receiving calls, making calls, and ending an ongoing call. But it bypasses actual interaction design. Better would be well-labeled controls that are optimized for the task, and that don’t rely on the user’s knowledge of directories and commands.

The 2500 phone came out in 1968, introducing consumers to the 12-key pushbutton interface rather than the older rotary dial on the 500 model. The 12-key is the filmmakers’ building on interface paradigms that audiences knew. This shortcutting belongs to the long lineage of sci-fi videophones that goes all the way back to Metropolis (1927) and Buck Rogers (1939).

Also, it’s worth noting that the ergonomics of the keypad are awkward, requiring users to poke at it in an error-prone way, or to seriously hyperextend their wrists. If you’re stuck with a numeric keypad as a wall mounted input, at least extend it out from the wall so it can be angled to a more comfortable 30°

Is it still OK to reference Dreyfuss? He hasn’t been Milkshake Ducked, has he?

There is another display in the CPO, but it lacks a numeric keypad. I presume it is just piping a copy of the feed from the main screen. (See below.)

Looking at the call from Forbin’s perspective, he has a much smaller display. There there is still a bump above the monitor for a camera, another numeric keypad below it, and several 2500 telephones. Multiple monitors on the DC desks show the same feed.

After Dr. Markham asks Dr. Forbin to steal an ashtray, he ends the call by pressing the key in the lower right-hand corner of the keypad.

Levels adjusted to reveal details of the interface.

After Colossus reveals that THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM, Forbin calls back and asks to be switched to the CPO. We see things from Forbin’s perspective, and we see the other fellow actually reach offscreen to where the numeric keypad would be, to do the switching. (See the image, below.) It’s likely that this actor was just staring at a camera, so this bit of consistency is really well done.

When Forbin later ends the call with the CPO, he presses the lower-left hand key. This is inconsistent with the way he ended the call earlier, but it’s entirely possible that each of the non-numeric keys perform the same function. This also a good example why well-labeled, specific controls would be better, like, say, one for “end call.”

Other video calls in the remainder of the movie don’t add any more information than these scenes provide, and introduce a few more questions.

The President calls to discuss Colossus’ demand to talk to Guardian.

Note the duplicate feed in the background in the image above. Other scenes tell us all the monitors in the CPO are also duplicating the feed. I wondered how users might tell the system which is the one to duplicate. In another scene we see that the President’s monitor is special and red, hinting that there might be a “hotseat” monitor, but this is not the monitor from which Dr. Forbin called at the beginning of the film. So, it’s a mystery.

Bemusedly discussing the deadly, deadly FOOM with the President.

The President ends his call with the Russian Chairman, which is a first of sorts for this blog.

In a multi-party conference call, The Chairman and Dr. Kuprin speak with the President and Forbin. No cameras are apparent here. This interface is managed by the workers sitting before it, but the interaction occurs off screen.

In the last video conference of the film, everyone listens to Unity’s demands. This is a multiparty teleconference between at least three locations, and it is not clear how it is determined whose face appears on the screen. Note that the CPO (the first in the set) has different feeds on display simultaneously, which would need some sort of control.

Plug: For more about the issues involved in sci-fi communications technology, see chapter 10 of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction. (Though it’s affordably only available in digital formats as of this post.)

Fox News

6 Nov 2018 by Christopher Noessel

“He tried taking water from toilets, but it’s Secretary Not Sure who finds himself in the toilet now. And as history pulls down its pants and prepares to lower its ass on Not Sure’s head it will be Daddy Justice who will be crapping on him this time.”

Today is election day. If you’re American, you’re voting, of course. (or, you know, GTFO.)

Because of voter suppression efforts by the GOP, many who are voting will be facing long lines. Help encourage these Americans, slogging as they are through the GOP swamp just for their right to vote, to stay the course by buying them some pizza. And if it’s you, know that you can report your long line to the same place and have some ‘za sent your way.

https://polls.pizza/

Godspeed, America.

I’ll get back to wrapping up Idiocracy later.

The Court of Idiots

31 Oct 2018 by Christopher Noessel

It’s Halloween, as if the news of the past week were not scary enough. Pipe bombs to Democratic leaders. The largest massacre of Jewish people in on American soil in history. The murder of two black senior citizens by a white supremacist in Kentucky. Now let’s add to it with this nightmare scene from Idiocracy. Full disclosure: We’re covering technology as old as civilization here, so there won’t be any screen interfaces.

Joe is wheeled into the courtroom in a cage. There is a large gallery there, all of whom are booing him. One throws his milkshake at the accused. Others throw trash. The narrator says, “Joe was arrested for not paying his hospital bill and not having his IPP tattoo. He would soon discover that in the future, Justice was not only blind, but had become rather retarded as well.”

Joe is let out of his cage. The judge, identified by his name plate as The Honorable Hector “The Hangman,” stands at his bench in a spotlight in front of a wall of logos, grinning in anticipation at a new victim. He slams a massive gavel and shouts at the booing crowd, “Listen up! Now. I’m fixin’ to commensurate this trial here. [All of this is sic.] We gon’ see if we can’t come up with a verdict up in here. Now. Since y’all say y’ain’t got no money, we have proprietarily obtained you one of them court-appointed lawyers. So, put your hands together to give it up for Frito Pendejo!”

Frito, wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt with “ATTORNEY AT LAW” running down the sleeve, sits and looks at a paper on the counsel table, saying “Says here you, uh, robbed a hospital?! Why’d you do that?” Joe says, “But I’m not guilty!” Frito replies, “That’s not what the other lawyer said.”

When the trial officially starts, the judge says, “Shut up. Shut up! Now, prosecutor. Why you think he done it?” The prosecutor stands up and says, “K. Number one, your honor. Just look at him.” Most everyone in the courtroom, including, Frito, laughs at this. Frito stands up and says, “He talks like a fag, too!” When more laughter dies down, the prospector continues, saying, “We’ve got all this, like, evidence, of how, like, this guy didn’t even pay at the hospital and I heard that he doesn’t even have his tattoo.” There are collective gasps. He continues, “I know! And I’m all, ‘You gotta be shitting me.’ But check this out, man, judge should be like, ‘Guilty!’ Peace.” The gallery erupts with applause and cheers. There is one guy wearing a helmet with a camera mounted to the top and he takes it all in dumbly.

When Frito stands to raise an objection, he says, “Your honor, I object…that this guy, also broke my apartment and shit.” There are gasps from the gallery, and Frito feels emboldened. “Yeah! And you know what else, I object that he’s not going to have any money to pay me after he pays back all the money he stole from the hospital!” This last bit is addressed to the gallery. They shout in anger. Frito finishes, saying, “And I object. I OBJECT that he interrupted me while I was watching, OW, MY BALLS! THAT IS NOT OK! I REST MY CASE.”

Joe stands and says, “Your Honor, I’m pretty sure we have a mistrial, here, sir.” Hector looks confused at this statement. Frito gets hostile and says, “I’m going to mistrial my foot up your ass if you don’t shut up!”

Joe ignores him and says, “Please listen!” The prosecuting attorney simply mocks him, “Please listen!” Hector laughs. The lawyers high five each other.

The narrator says, “Joe stated his case, logically and passionately. But his perceived effeminate voice only drew big gales of stupid laughter. Without adequate legal representation, Joe was given a stiff sentence.”

So…this nightmare

For most Americans, the drafting and adjudication of laws feels like something that happens “out there.” But upholding the law is something that, through jury duty or being part of a court case, is something most citizens directly experience some time in their lives. So it may seem like familiar, everyday stuff.

WitnessForTheProsecution575-600x365 — Wait. I know this.

But take that less trodden path to ask why it is the way it is, and you’ll eventually find yourself at the foundations of civilization and in the throes of philosophy. A key premise and promise of civilized society is having a fair and rational place for citizens to air grievances, and institutions that make and enforce just laws. In practice it’s far from perfect, but I’d bet most folks agree it’s better than the alternatives of lawlessness, personal violence, revenge, tribal feuds, and vigilantism.

Laws and courts are institutions that are so old and foundational, it’s hard to remember that:

They were, in fact, invented. There was a time before them.
There were reasons for the way they were designed.
Their design, like all designs, aren’t perfect, and involve some trade offs.
They evolve over time.
There are alternate designs to consider.

Idiocracy illustrates how important its norms are, and how tragic it can be when those norms are lost, and everyone involved is a fucking idiot. It’s not exactly monster rampage, body horror, or torture porn, but this scene is as scary a thing as you could ask for Halloween.

Violence as a means

Frito threatens violence a lot. So do a lot of the people in Idiocracy. I’m not even sure if they mean it, but they think that threatening or beating or shooting someone into silence is a fine way to disagree. One of the key promises of civilization is to undo that might-makes-right bullshit that kept generations of peasants suffering while an aristocracy lived the high life peeing in hallways, flubbing courtly love, and stuffng birds into each other like meaty nesting-dolls. We’ve moved on.

Skepticism

It’s funny-terrifying that the case made against Joe is so stupid. There are crass appeals to emotion. Prosecution says that there’s “all this, like, evidence” but does not actually share any, like, evidence. Frito riles the Gallery up with insults “he talks like a fag” and personal grievances that aren’t germane to the case. (Ow My Balls! should not be evidence in, well, anything.) It’s emotional theater and the audience eats it up, because what they’re there for is hits to the amygdala bong: The emotional highs and lows that you might get from a sports show. People screaming in cheers when their confirmation bias is rewarded, or fury when there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance. There’s probably nothing like a Fair Witness left on the planet, and if it weren’t for Joe’s intelligence that gets him out of jail, he would wind up suffering in prison for no reason at all. The lack of skepticism, of applying doubt to all things—especially the things that thrill you emotionally—causes unnecessary suffering. Sure, it’s an unjust universe, but civilization was invented to try and hold a little light against that darkness. The citizenry of Idiocracy are gullible and blithely self-serving to a cruel fault.

Impartiality

The system that pits prosecution against defense and presumes is called “adversarial,” since each counsel will present opposing cases to an impartial judge or jury, who is presumed competent to sort through the competing claims to come to the truth. It’s contrasted with an inquisitorial (or nonadversarial) system where the judges run the line of inquiry. Congressional hearings, for example, are much more of an inquisitorial system. Congresspeople ask the questions, rather than the lawyers.

The adversarial system depends on the impartiality of the judge and jury. If they presume guilt or innocence from the start, why have the trial at all? (This is sometimes called a kangaroo court, where procedure and ethics are ignored, and the outcome is a foregone conclusion.) Only dispassionate, neutral participants can look past their feelers to find a fair and impartial truth. You need people capable of impartial, critical thinking to look past the tricks and their own cognitive biases. That’s out the window in Idiocracy.

Joe is presumed guilty by literally everyone involved. It’s not wholly their fault. Joe is brought in wearing prison fatigues. He is wheeled in a cage. On the surface, he looks guilty. Humans have an availability bias, wherein easily recalled information is believed to be true and representative, and for very stupid people, that can be strictly what they see. And Joe looks guilty. Everyone around me is shouting that he’s guilty. So, the idiot thinks, he must be guilty.

Posers, surface evidence, and meaning

One of the worst things about the scene—and this plays out in the movie generally—is how people’s status is based on stupid, surface markers. For instance: Why do they accept that the judge is smart? Well, he uses fancy, “faggy” words like “commensurate” (It’s a malaprop. He means commence. But the Idiocrats are too stupid to know this.) and “proprietarily.” (I think he means “properly,” but it’s marvelously hard to tell.) Investigating this moves us very quickly into the semiosis treadmill, whereby a sign comes slowly to become the signified, even when it stupidly contradicts the original thing that was signified.

How do courts protect against idiocy?

It doesn’t always. But generally, there are lots of checks against incompetence. Anyone can request a mistrial if it’s shown that counsel, a judge, or a jury is incompetent, prejudiced, or doesn’t follow the rules. Lawyers can be reviewed and disbarred. Remedy for judges varies by state, but judges can be impeached, or undergo judicial review and be removed from their office. Their cases can be overturned by higher courts. (Yes, even that one.)

But notably all these presume that the incompetence is abnormal, and that others are competent to review and judge their competence. When everyone either gets so stupid or so corrupt that they have no interest in checking each other for fairness, the system just collapses.

Can design do anything?

This blog is primarily targeted at people who work in technology and love sci-fi. (Like I do.) A natural question is: Can design do anything to help inoculate courts against Idiocracy? And normally, I try to offer some hopeful answer to these questions, but this one has me stumped. What design interventions could we impose to increase skepticism? Impartiality? Critical thinking? Understanding? Seriously, if you have something, I’d love to hear it, because as of right now, I’ve got nothing.

How’s that for a Halloween scare?

Trick or Treat

Any Trump acolyte who has gleefully shouted “Lock her up! Lock her up!” at one of their farrowing-crate rallies, despite Clinton’s exoneration by the FBI, despite Trump’s own ongoing litany of scandals (including that ongoing issue of security), is guilty of this same kind of mob mentality as these morons in Idiocracy. It is all raw hate without reason. Hits from the tribalism bong. It’s not just that the mob hasn’t heard reason, it’s not interested in reason, only in justification. Only in thinking of political conversations as hobo fights. Did our guy land a hit? Insult? Hur dur, yarp.

It’s pretty soul crushing. So let’s have some spooky, escapist fun tonight for self-care. But as of tomorrow we’ll have 6 days and we should hit it hard.

Snitch phone

23 Jan 2018 by Christopher Noessel

If you’re reading these chronologically, let me note here that I had to skip Bea Arthur’s marvelous turn as Ackmena, as she tends the bar and rebuffs the amorous petitions of the lovelorn, hole-in-the-head Krelman, before singing her frustrated patrons out of the bar when a curfew is announced. To find the next interface of note, we have to forward to when…

Han and Chewie arrive, only to find a Stormtrooper menacing Lumpy. Han knocks the blaster out of his hand, and when the Stormtrooper dives to retrieve it, he falls through the bannister of the tree house and to his death.

Why aren’t these in any way affiiiiixxxxxxeeeeeeed?

Han enters the home and wishes everyone a Happy Life Day. Then he bugs out.

But I still have to return for the insane closing number. Hold me.

Then Saun Dann returns to the home just before a general alert comes over the family Imperial Issue Media Console.

This is a General Alert. Calling Officer B4711. Officer B4711. We are unable to reach you on your comlink. Is there a problem. [sic] You are instructed to turn on your comlink immediately.

Dann tells the family he can handle it. He walks to the TV and pulls a card out of his wallet. He inserts it into the console, mashes a few buttons and turns his attention to the screen. After a moment of op-art static, General Alert person appears. He says, “We have two way communication, traitor Saun Dann. Is this a report about the missing trooper?”

Dann (like so many rebels) lies, saying the stormtrooper robbed the house and fled for the hills. GA says, “Very well, we’ll send out a search party.” Sean thanks him and the exchange is over. Sean hits a button, pulls his card out of the console, and returns it to his wallet.

Sadly I must bypass the plot questions about the body of the Stormtrooper that is still lying in the forest floor beneath them that will surely be found, or that GA will eventually not find B4711 in the forest and return demanding answers, or why everyone is acting like welp that’s fixed. For this blog is about interfaces.

Whether the card was meant as identification or payment, the interaction is pretty decent. Saun has no trouble fitting it in the slot, and apparently he has no trouble recalling the number to dial the Empire. The same guy in the message answers the call quickly. After the exchange, it’s quick to wrap up. Pull out card, and call is over. Seriously, that’s as short and simple as we could make it.

What was the card for?

If it was payment, we would expect some charges to appear during and after the fact, so let’s just presume it was an identification card for the Empire to track. Since the Empire is evil, they might hide or not provide feedback that the caller has been identified. So it’s not diegetically surprising to note that there’s none.

For all the interfaces that are utter crap in this show, this one actually passes muster. It tempts me to establish some sort of law—that the more mundane interfaces in a show will always be the more believable ones. I’ll think on that. It would need a name.

If I was to add any improvement, it would be to not burden the citizen’s memory with remembering the general alert or how to act on it. What if you’d just caught the end of it? Rather than burdening memory, the Empire could add a crawl to the feed, that persistently repeats the call to action including contact information. Persuasively, it would be an annoyance that would cause citizens watching TV to really want B4711 to hurry up and turn his damn comlink on, or for someone to rat him out.

There are probably some fascist tactics for incentivizing either the Stormtrooper or a snitch’s compliance, but I’m not a fascist, so let’s not go there.

Instead let’s rejoice that there is but one more interface to review, and we can stop with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Jasper’s home alarm

22 Mar 2017 by Christopher Noessel

When Theo, Kee, and Miriam flee the murderous Fishes, they take refuge in Jasper’s home for the night. They are awoken in the morning by Jasper’s sentry system.

A loud cacophonous alarm sounds, made up of what sounds like recorded dog barks, bells clanging, and someone banging a stick on a metal trash can lid. Jasper explains to everyone in the house that “It’s the alarm! Someone’s breaking in!”

They gather around a computer screen with large speakers on either side. The screen shows four video feeds labeled ROAD A, FOREST A, FRONT DOOR, and ROAD B. Labels reading MOTION DETECTED <> blink at the bottom of the ROAD A and ROAD B feeds, where we can see members of the Fishes removing the brush that hides the driveway to Jasper’s house.

The date overlays the upper right hand corner of the screen, 06-DEC-2027, 08:10:58.

Across the bottom is a control panel of white numbers and icons on red backgrounds.

A radio button control for the number of video feeds to be displayed. Though we are seeing the 4-up display, the icon does not appear to be different than the rest.
16 enumerated icons, the purpose for which is unclear.
Video control icons for reverse, stop, play, and fast forward.
Three buttons with gray backgrounds and icons.
A wide button blinking MASTER ALARM

The scene cuts to Jasper’s rushing to the car outside the home, where none of the cacophony can be heard.

Similar to his car dashoard, it makes sense that Jasper has made this alarm himself. This might explain the clunky layout and somewhat inscrutable icons. (What do the numbers do? What about that flower on the gray background?)

The three jobs of an intruder alarm

Jasper’s alarm is OK. It certainly does the job of grabbing the household’s attention, which is the first job of an alarm, and does it without alerting the intruders, as we see in the shot outside the house.

It could do a bit better at the second job of an alarm, which is to inform the household of the nature of the problem. That they have to gather around the monitor takes precious time that could be used for making themselves safer. It could be improved by removing this requirement.

If Jasper had added more information to the audio alarm, even so basic as a prerecorded “Motion on the road! Motion on the road!” then they might not have needed to gather around the monitor at all.
If the relevant video feeds could be piped to wearable devices, phones, or their car, then they can fill in their understanding at the same time that they are taking steps to getting the hell out of there.
Having the artificial intelligence that we have in actual-world 2017 (much less speculative 2027), we know that narrow AI can process that video to have many more details in the broadcast message. “Motion on the road! I see three cars and at least a dozen armed men!”

There is arguably a third job of an advanced alarm, and this is to help the household understand the best course of action. This can be problematic when the confidence of the recommendation is low. But if the AI can confidently make a recommendation, it can use whatever actuators it has to help them along their way.

It could be informational, such as describing the best option. The audio alarm could encourage them to “Take the back road!” It could even alert the police (though in the world of Children of Men, Jasper would not trust them and they may be disinclined to care.)
The alarm could give some parameters and best-practice recommendations like, “You have 10 minutes to be in the car! Save only yourselves, carry nothing!”
It could keep updating the situation and the countdown so the household does not have to monitor it.
It can physically help as best it can, like remotely starting and positioning cars for them.

This can get conceptually tricky as the best course of action may be conditional, e.g. “If you can get to the car in 5 minutes, then escape is your best option, but if it takes longer or you have defenses, then securing the home and alerting the police is the better bet.” But that may be too much to process in the moment, and for a household that does not rehearse response scenarios, the simpler instruction may be safer.

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.

Green Laser Scan

13 Jan 2017 by Christopher Noessel

In a very brief scene, Theo walks through a security arch on his way into the Ministry of Energy. After waiting in queue, he walks towards a rectangular archway. At his approach, two horizontal green laser lines scan him from head to toe. Theo passes through the arch with no trouble.

childrenofmen-002

Though the archway is quite similar to metal detection technology used in airports today, the addition of the lasers hints at additional data being gathered, such as surface mapping for a face-matching algorithm.

We know that security mostly cares about what’s hidden under clothes or within bodies and bags, rather than confirming the surface that security guards can see, so it’s not likely to be an actual technological requirement of the scan. Rather it is a visual reminder to participants and onlookers that the scan is in progress, and moreover that this the Ministry is a secured space.

Though we could argue that the signal could be made more visible, laser light is very eye catching and human eyes are most sensitive at 555nm, and this bright green is the closest to the 808 diode laser at 532nm. So for being an economic, but eye catching signal, this green laser is a perfect choice.

faa-vcf-spectrum-rainbow-curve-better-colors-on-white_450w.jpg

From LaserPointerSafety.com

R. S. Revenge Comms

13 Dec 2016 by Christopher Noessel

Note: In honor of the season, Rogue One opening this week, and the reviews of Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series behind us, I’m reopening the Star Wars Holiday Special reviews, starting with the show-within-a-show, The Faithful Wookie. Refresh yourself of the plot if it’s been a while.

On board the R.S. Revenge, the purple-skinned communications officer announces he’s picked up something. (Genders are a goofy thing to ascribe to alien physiology, but the voice actor speaks in a masculine register, so I’m going with it.)

He attends a monitor, below which are several dials and controls in a panel. On the right of the monitor screen there are five physical controls.

A stay-state toggle switch
A stay-state rocker switch
Three dials

The lower two dials have rings under them on the panel that accentuate their color.

Map View

The screen is a dark purple overhead map of the impossibly dense asteroid field in which the Revenge sits. A light purple grid divides the space into 48 squares. This screen has text all over it, but written in a constructed orthography unmentioned in the Wookieepedia. In the upper center and upper right are unchanging labels. Some triangular label sits in the lower-left. In the lower right corner, text appears and disappears too fast for (human) reading. The middle right side of the screen is labeled in large characters, but they also change too rapidly to make much sense of it.

Luke, looking over the shoulder of the comms officer at the same monitor, exclaims, “It’s the Millennium Falcon!”

faithful-wookiee-12 — Seriously, Luke, how can you tell this?

Watching the glowing dot and crosshairs blink and change position several times, the comms officer says, “They’re coming out of light speed. I can’t make contact.” An off-screen voice tells him to “Try a lower channel.” Something causes the channel to change (the comms officer’s hands do not touch anything that we can see), and then the monitor shows a video feed from the Falcon.

Video Feed

The video feed has an overlay to the upper left hand side, consisting of lines of text which appear from top to bottom in a palimpsest formation, even though the copy is left-aligned. At the top is a label with changing characters, looking something like a time stamp.

Analysis of the Map View

Since we can’t read the video overlay in the video feed, and it doesn’t interfere with the image, there’s not much to say about it. Instead I’ll focus on the map view.

Hand-drawn Inconsistency

In the side angle shot, which we see first, we see the dial colors go from top to bottom, as beige, red, yellow. In the facing shot of this interface, which immediately follows the side shot, the dials go beige, yellow, red. The red and yellow are transposed. Itʼs of course possible that the dials have a variable hue, and changed at exactly the same time the camera switches. But then we have to explain where his hand went, and why we don’t see any of the other elements changing color, and so on…

A purple character with a space suit interacts with a technological device, while a group of characters, including one dressed in yellow and one in a white gown, observe the scene in a futuristic setting.

A futuristic monitor displaying a purple grid with various cosmic elements and symbols, featuring graphical data and navigation controls on the right side.

This illustrates one of the problems with reviewing hand-drawn animation (and why scifiinterfaces generally frowns upon it.) It takes a hand-drawing animator extra work to keep things consistent from screen to screen. She must have a reference when drawing the interface from any new angle, and this extra work is on top of all the other things she has to manage like color and timing. Fewer people will notice transposed dial colors than, say, the comms officer turning orange instead of purple, so the interface is low on that priority stack.

Contrast that with live-action and computer-animated interfaces. In these modes of working, it takes extra work to change interfaces from shot to shot, so you run into consistency problems much less frequently.

I’ve written about this before in the abstract, but it’s nice to have a simple and easily shown example in the blog to point to.

2Dness

Another problem with the interface is that it is 2-D, but space is 3-D.

When picking a projection to display, we have to keep in mind that it is more immediate to understand an impending collision when presented as 2-D information: Constant bearing, decreasing range = Trouble. So, perhaps the view has automatically aligned itself to be perpendicular to the Falcon’s approach, which makes it easier to monitor the decreasing distance.

If so, he would need to see that automatically-aligned status reflected somewhere in the interface, and have access to controls that let him change the view and snap back to this Most Useful View. Admittedly, this is a lot of apologetics to apply, when really, it’s most likely the old trope 2-D Space.

Attention and memory

There are some nicely designed attention cues. The crosshairs, glowing dot, and motion graphics makes it so that—even though we can’t read the language—we can tell what’s of interest on the screen. One dot moving towards another, stationary dot. We’re set up for the Falcon’s buzzing the base.

That’s probably the best thing that can be said for it.

The text is terrible, changing too fast for a human reader. (Yes, yes, put down that emerging comment. Purple-face isnʼt human, but we must evaluate interfaces considering what is useful to us, and right now that means us humans.) The text changes so much faster than the blinking, in fact, that it’s pulling attention away from it. Narratively, the rapid-fire text helps convey a sense of urgency, but it greatly costs readability. It’s not a good model for real world design.

The blinking crosshair might most accurately reflect the actual position of the detected object within the radar sweep. But it could help the officer more. As with medical signals, data points are not as interesting as information trends. As it is, it relies on his memory to piece together the information, which means he has to constantly monitor the screen to make sense. If instead the view featured an evaporating trail of data points, not only could he look away without missing too much information, but he would also notice that the speed and direction are slightly erratic, which would prove quite interesting to anyone trying to ascertain the status of the ship. One glance shows things are not as they should be. The Falcon is clearly careening.

tracking_assistance — Actual points from the animation.

Mysterious Control

When we first see the comms officer, he has his unmoving hand on one of the dials. But when we see the map switch to the video feed, none of the controls we can see are touched. This raises a possibility and a question.

The possibility is that there is control by some other mechanism. My best guess is that it is voice control, since the Rebel General says “try a lower channel” just before it switches. Maybe he was not speaking to the comms officer, but to the machine itself. And given C3PO, they clearly have the technology to recognize and act on natural language, though it’s usually associated with a full general artificial intelligence. A Rebel Siri (33 years before it came out in Apple’s iOS) makes sense from an apologetics sense.

If so, there are some aspects of the UI missing to signal to an operator that the machine is listening, and hearing, and understanding what is being said, as well as whether the speaker is authorized to control. After all, the comms officer is wearing the headset, but it was the red-bearded general who issued the command. I imagine it’s not OK for anyone on the bridge to just shout out controls.

faithful-wookiee-13 — Just General Burnside, here.

The question then, is if the channel is controlled by voice, what are the physical controls for? They’re lacking labels of any kind. Perhaps they’re there as a backup, should voice control fail. Perhaps they are vestigial, left over from before voice control was installed. Maybe only the general has a voice override and the comms officer must use the physical controls. Any of these would be fine backworlding explanations, but my favorite idea is that the dials are for controlling nuanced variables in very fluid ways with instant feedback.

It’s easier to twiddle a dial to change the frequency of a radio to find a low-power signal than to keep saying “back…forward…no, back just a bit.” That would help explain what the comms officer was doing with his hands on the dials when he got something but not when the general voice-controls the channel.

In general

The interface shows some sophistication in styling and visual hierarchy, and if we give it lots of benefit of the doubt, might even be handling some presentation variables for the user in sophisticated ways. But the distractions of the rapid-fire text, the lack of trend lines, the lack of labels for the physical controls, and the missing affordances for projection control and voice control feedback make it a poor model for any real world design.

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

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