Tag Archives: volumetric display

Wakandan Med Table

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When Agent Ross is shot in the back during Klaue’s escape from the Busan field office, T’Challa stuffs a kimoyo bead into the wound to staunch the bleeding, but the wounds are still serious enough that the team must bring him back to Wakanda for healing. They float him to Shuri’s lab on a hover-stretcher.

Here Shuri gets to say the juicy line, “Great. Another white boy for us to fix. This is going to be fun.”
Sorry about the blurry screen shot, but this is the most complete view of the bay.

The hover-stretcher gets locked into place inside a bay. The bay is a small room in the center of Shuri’s lab, open on two sides. The walls are covered in a gray pattern suggesting a honeycomb. A bas-relief volumetric projection displays some medical information about the patient like vital signs and a subtle fundus image of the optic nerve.

Shuri holds her hand flat and raises it above the patient’s chest. A volumetric display of 9 of his thoracic vertebrae rises up in response. One of the vertebrae is highlighted in a bright red. A section of the wall display displays the same information in 2D, cyan with orange highlights. That display section slides out from the wall to draw observer’s attentions. Hexagonal tiles flip behind the display for some reason, but produce no change in the display.

Shuri reaches her hands up to the volumetric vertebrae, pinches her forefingers and thumbs together, and pull them apart. In response, the space between the vertebrae expands, allowing her to see the top and bottom of the body of the vertebra.

She then turns to the wall display, and reading something there, tells the others that he’ll live. Her attention is pulled away with the arrival of Wakabe, bringing news of Killmonger. We do not see her initiate a treatment in the scene. We have to presume that she did it between cuts. (There would have to be a LOT of confidence in an AI’s ability to diagnose and determine treatment before they would let Griot do that without human input.)

We’ll look more closely at the hover-stretcher display in a moment, but for now let’s pause and talk about the displays and the interaction of this beat.

A lab is not a recovery room

This doesn’t feel like a smart environment to hold a patient. We can bypass a lot of the usual hospital concerns of sterilization (it’s a clean room) or readily-available equipment (since they are surrounded by programmable vibranium dust controlled by an AGI) or even risk of contamination (something something AI). I’m mostly thinking about the patient having an environment that promotes healing: Natural light, quiet or soothing music, plants, furnishing, and serene interiors. Having him there certainly means that Shuri’s team can keep an eye on him, and provide some noise that may act as a stimulus, but don’t they have actual hospital rooms in Wakanda? 

Why does she need to lift it?

The VP starts in his chest, but why? If it had started out as a “translucent skin” illusion, like we saw in Lost in Space (1998, see below), then that might make sense. She would want to lift it to see it in isolation from the distracting details of the body. But it doesn’t start this way, it starts embedded within him?!

The “translucent skin” display from Lost in Space (1998)

It’s a good idea to have a representation close to the referent, to make for easy comparison between them. But to start the VP within his opaque chest just doesn’t make sense.

This is probably the wrong gesture

In the gestural interfaces chapter of  Make It So, I described a pidgin that has been emerging in sci-fi which consisted of 7 “words.” The last of these is “Pinch and Spread to Scale.” Now, there is nothing sacred about this gestural language, but it has echoes in the real world as well. For one example, Google’s VR painting app Tilt Brush uses “spread to scale.” So as an increasingly common norm, it should only be violated with good reason. In Black Panther, Shuri uses spread to mean “spread these out,” even though she starts the gesture near the center of the display and pulls out at a 45° angle. This speaks much more to scaling than to spreading. It’s a mismatch and I can’t see a good reason for it. Even if it’s “what works for her,” gestural idiolects hinder communities of practice, and so should be avoided.

Better would have been pinching on one end of the spine and hooking her other index finger to spread it apart without scaling. The pinch is quite literal for “hold” and the hook quite literal for “pull.” This would let scale be scale, and “hook-pull” to mean “spread components along an axis.”

Model from https://justsketch.me/

If we were stuck with the footage of Shuri doing the scale gesture, then it would have made more sense to scale the display, and fade the white vertebrae away so she could focus on the enlarged, damaged one. She could then turn it with her hand to any arbitrary orientation to examine it.

An object highlight is insufficient

It’s quite helpful for an interface that can detect anomalies to help focus a user’s attention there. The red highlight for the damaged vertebrae certainly helps draw attention. Where’s the problem? Ah, yes. There’s the problem. But it’s more helpful for the healthcare worker to know the nature of the damage, what the diagnosis is, to monitor the performance of the related systems, and to know how the intervention is going. (I covered these in the medical interfaces chapter of Make It So, if you want to read more.) So yes, we can see which vertebra is damaged, but what is the nature of that damage? A slipped disc should look different than a bone spur, which should look different than one that’s been cracked or shattered from a bullet. The thing-red display helps for an instant read in the scene, but fails on close inspection and would be insufficient in the real world.

This is not directly relevant to the critique, but interesting that spinal VPs have been around since 1992. Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Ethics” (Season 5, Episode 16).

Put critical information near the user’s locus of attention

Why does Shuri have to turn and look at the wall display at all? Why not augment the volumetric projection with the data that she needs? You might worry that it could obscure the patient (and thereby hinder direct observations) but with an AGI running the show, it could easily position those elements to not occlude her view.

Compare this display, which puts a waveform directly adjacent to the brain VP. Firefly, “Ariel” (Episode 9, 2002).

Note that Shuri is not the only person in the room interested in knowing the state of things, so a wall display isn’t bad, but it shouldn’t be the only augmentation.

Lastly, why does she need to tell the others that Ross will live? if there was signifcant risk of his death, there should be unavoidable environmental signals. Klaxons or medical alerts. So unless we are to believe T’Challa has never encountered a single medical emergency before (even in media), this is a strange thing for her to have to say. Of course we understand she’s really telling us in the audience that we don’t need to wonder about this plot development any more, but it would be better, diegetically, if she had confirmed the time-to-heal, like, “He should be fine in a few hours.”

Alternatively, it would be hilarious turnabout if the AI Griot had simply not been “trained” on data that included white people, and “could not see him,” which is why she had to manually manage the diagnosis and intervention, but that would have massive impact on the remote piloting and other scenes, so isn’t worth it. Probably.

Thoughts toward a redesign

So, all told, this interface and interaction could be much better fit-to-purpose. Clarify the gestural language. Lose the pointless flipping hexagons. Simplify the wall display for observers to show vitals, diagnosis and intervention, as well as progress toward the goal. Augment the physician’s projection with detailed, contextual data. And though I didn’t mention it above, of course the bone isn’t the only thing damaged, so show some of the other damaged tissues, and some flowing, glowing patterns to show where healing is being done along with a predicted time-to-completion.

Stretcher display

Later, when Ross is fully healed and wakes up, we see a shot of of the med table from above. Lots of cyan and orange, and *typography shudder* stacked type. Orange outlines seem to indicate controls, tough they bear symbols rather than full labels, which we know is better for learnability and infrequent reuse. (Linguist nerds: Yes, Wakandan is alphabetic rather than logographic.)

These feel mostly like FUIgetry, with the exception of a subtle respiration monitor on Ross’ left. But it shows current state rather than tracked over time, so still isn’t as helpful as it could be.

Then when Ross lifts his head, the hexagons begin to flip over, disabling the display. What? Does this thing only work when the patient’s head is in the exact right space? What happens when they’re coughing, or convulsing? Wouldn’t a healthcare worker still be interested in the last-recorded state of things? This “instant-off” makes no sense. Better would have been just to let the displays fade to a gray to indicate that it is no longer live data, and to have delayed the fade until he’s actually sitting up.

All told, the Wakandan medical interfaces are the worst of the ones seen in the film. Lovely, and good for quick narrative hit, but bad models for real-world design, or even close inspection within the world of Wakanda.

MLK Day Matters

Each post in the Black Panther review is followed by actions that you can take to support black lives.

Today is Martin Luther King Day. Normally there would be huge gatherings and public speeches about his legacy and the current state of civil rights. But the pandemic is still raging, and with the Capitol in Washington, D.C. having seen just last week an armed insurrection by supporters of outgoing and pouty loser Donald Trump, (in case that WP article hasn’t been moved yet, here’s the post under its watered-down title) worries about additional racist terrorism and violence.

So today we celebrate virtually, by staying at home, re-experiening his speeches and letters, and listening to the words of black leaders and prominent thinkers all around us, reminding us of the arc of the moral universe, and all the work it takes to bend it toward justice.

With the Biden team taking the reins on Wednesday, and Kamala Harris as our first female Vice President of color, things are looking brighter than they have in 4 long, terrible years. But Trump would have gotten nowhere if there hadn’t been a voting block and party willing to indulge his racist fascism. There’s still much more to do to dismantle systemic racism in the country and around the world. Let’s read, reflect, and use whatever platforms and resources we are privileged to have, act.

Who did it better? Santa Claus edition

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I presume my readership are adults. I honestly cannot imagine this site has much to offer the 3-to-8-year-old. That said, if you are less than 8.8 years old, be aware that reading this will land you FIRMLY on the naughty list. Leave before it’s too late. Oooh, look! Here’s something interesting for you.

For those who celebrate Yule (and the very hybridized version of the holiday that I’ll call Santa-Christmas to distinguish it from Jesus-Christmas or Horus-Christmas), it’s that one time of year where we watch holiday movies. Santa features in no small number of them, working against the odds to save Christmas and Christmas spirit from something that threatens it. Santa accomplishes all that he does by dint of holiday magic, but increasingly, he has magic-powered technology to help him. These technologies are different for each movie in which they appear, with different sci-fi interfaces, which raises the question: Who did it better?

Unraveling this stands to be even more complicated than usual sci-fi fare.

  • These shows are largely aimed at young children, who haven’t developed the critical thinking skills to doubt the core premise, so the makers don’t have much pressure to present wholly-believable worlds. The makers also enjoy putting in some jokes for adults that are non-diegetic and confound analysis.
  • Despite the fact that these magical technologies are speculative just as in sci-fi, makers cannot presume that their audience are sci-fi fans who are familiar with those tropes. And things can’t seem too technical.
  • The sci in this fi is magical, which allows makers to do all-sorts of hand-wavey things about how it’s doing what it’s doing.
  • Many of the choices are whimsical and serve to reinforce core tenets of the Santa Claus mythos rather than any particular story or worldbuilding purpose.

But complicated-ness has rarely cowed this blog’s investigations before, why let a little thing like holiday magic do it now?

Ho-Ho-hubris!

A Primer on Santa

I have readers from all over the world. If you’re from a place that does not celebrate the Jolly Old Elf, a primer should help. And if you’re from a non-USA country, your Saint Nick mythos will be similar but not the same one that these movies are based on, so a clarification should help. To that end, here’s what I would consider the core of it.

Santa Claus is a magical, jolly, heavyset old man with white hair, mustache, and beard who lives at the North Pole with his wife Ms. Claus. The two are almost always caucasian. He can alternately be called Kris Kringle, Saint Nick, Father Christmas, or Klaus. The Clark Moore poem calls him a “jolly old elf.” He is aware of the behavior of children, and tallies their good and bad behavior over the year, ultimately landing them on the “naughty” or “nice” list. Santa brings the nice ones presents. (The naughty ones are canonically supposed to get coal in their stockings though in all my years I have never heard of any kids actually getting coal in lieu of presents.) Children also hang special stockings, often on a mantle, to be filled with treats or smaller presents. Adults encourage children to be good in the fall to ensure they get presents. As December approaches, Children write letters to Santa telling him what presents they hope for. Santa and his elves read the letters and make all the requested toys by hand in a workshop. Then the evening of 24 DEC, he puts all the toys in a large sack, and loads it into a sleigh led by 8 flying reindeer. Most of the time there is a ninth reindeer up front with a glowing red nose named Rudolph. He dresses in a warm red suit fringed with white fur, big black boots, thick black belt, and a stocking hat with a furry ball at the end. Over the evening, as children sleep, he delivers the presents to their homes, where he places them beneath the Christmas tree for them to discover in the morning. Families often leave out cookies and milk for Santa to snack on, and sometimes carrots for the reindeer. Santa often tries to avoid detection for reasons that are diegetically vague.

There is no single source of truth for this mythos, though the current core text might be the 1823 C.E. poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore. Visually, Santa’s modern look is often traced back to the depictions by Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast, which the Coca-Cola Corporation built upon for their holiday advertisements in 1931.

Both these illustrations are by Nast.

There are all sorts of cultural conversations to have about the normalizing a magical panopticon, what effect hiding the actual supply chain has, and asking for what does perpetuating this myth train children; but for now let’s stick to evaluating the interfaces in terms of Santa’s goals.

Santa’s goals

Given all of the above, we can say that the following are Santa’s goals.

  • Sort kids by behavior as naughty or nice
    • Many tellings have him observing actions directly
    • Manage the lists of names, usually on separate lists
  • Manage letters
    • Reading letters
    • Sending toy requests to the workshop
    • Storing letters
  • Make presents
  • Travel to kids’ homes
    • Find the most-efficient way there
    • Control the reindeer
    • Maintain air safety
      • Avoid air obstacles
    • Find a way inside and to the tree
    • Enjoy the cookies / milk
  • Deliver all presents before sunrise
  • For each child:
    • Know whether they are naughty or nice
    • If nice, match the right toy to the child
    • Stage presents beneath the tree
  • Avoid being seen

We’ll use these goals to contextualize the Santa interfaces against.

This is the Worst Santa, but the image is illustrative of the weather challenges.

Typical Challenges

Nearly every story tells of Santa working with other characters to save Christmas. (The metaphor that we have to work together to make Christmas happen is appreciated.) The challenges in the stories can be almost anything, but often include…

  • Inclement weather (usually winter, but Santa is a global phenomenon)
  • Air safety
    • Air obstacles (Planes, helicopters, skyscrapers)
  • Ingress/egress into homes
  • Home security systems / guard dogs

The Contenders

Imdb.com lists 847 films tagged with the keyword “santa claus,” which is far too much to review. So I looked through “best of” lists (two are linked below) and watched those films for interfaces. There weren’t many. I even had to blend CGI and live action shows, which I’m normally hesitant to do. As always, if you know of any additional shows that should be considered, please mention it in the comments.

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-christmas-movies/https://screenrant.com/best-santa-claus-holiday-movies-ranked/

After reviewing these films, the ones with Santa interfaces came down to four, presented below in chronological order.

The Santa Clause (1994)

This movie deals with the lead character, Scott Calvin, inadvertently taking on the “job” of Santa Clause. (If you’ve read Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, this plot will feel quite familiar.)

The sleigh he inherits has a number of displays that are largely unexplained, but little Charlie figures out that the center console includes a hot chocolate and cookie dispenser. There is also a radar, and far away from it, push buttons for fog, planes, rain, and lightning. There are several controls with Christmas bell icons associated with them, but the meaning of these are unclear.

Santa’s hat in this story has headphones and the ball has a microphone for communicating with elves back in the workshop.

This is the oldest of the candidates. Its interfaces are quite sterile and “tacked on” compared to the others, but was novel for its time.

The Santa Clause on imdb.com

Fred Claus (2007)

This movie tells the story of Santa’s n’er do well brother Fred, who has to work in the workshop for one season to work off bail money. While there he winds up helping forestall foreclosure from an underhanded supernatural efficiency expert, and un-estranging himself from his family. A really nice bit in this critically-panned film is that Fred helps Santa understand that there are no bad kids, just kids in bad circumstances.

Fred is taken to the North Pole in a sled with switches that are very reminiscent of the ones in The Santa Clause. A funny touch is the “fasten your seatbelt” sign like you might see in a commercial airliner. The use of Lombardic Capitals font is a very nice touch given that much of modern Western Santa Claus myth (and really, many of our traditions) come from Germany.

The workshop has an extensive pneumatic tube system for getting letters to the right craftself.

This chamber is where Santa is able to keep an eye on children. (Seriously panopticony. They have no idea they’re being surveilled.) Merely by reading the name and address of a child a volumetric display appears within the giant snowglobe. The naughtiest children’s names are displayed on a digital split-flap display, including their greatest offenses. (The nicest are as well, but we don’t get a close up of it.)

The final tally is put into a large book that one of the elves manages from the sleigh while Santa does the actual gift-distribution. The text in the book looks like it was printed from a computer.

Fred Clause on imdb.com

Arthur Christmas (2011)

In this telling, the Santa job is passed down patrilineally. The oldest Santa, GrandSanta, is retired. The dad, Malcolm, is the current-acting Santa one, and he has two sons. One is Steve, a by-the-numbers type into military efficiency and modern technology. The other son, Arthur, is an awkward fellow who has a semi-disposable job responding to letters. Malcolm currently pilots a massive mile-wide spaceship from which ninja elves do the gift distribution. They have a lot of tech to help them do their job. The plot involves Arthur working with Grandsanta using his old Sleigh to get a last forgotten gift to a young girl before the sun rises.

To help manage loud pets in the home who might wake up sleeping people, this gun has a dial for common pets that delivers a treat to distract them.

Elves have face scanners which determine each kids’ naughty/nice percentage. The elf then enters this into a stocking-filling gun, which affects the contents in some unseen way. A sweet touch is when one elf scans a kid who is read as quite naughty, the elf scans his own face to get a nice reading instead.

The S-1 is the name of the spaceship sleigh at the beginning (at the end it is renamed after Grandsanta’s sleigh). Its bridge is loaded with controls, volumetric displays, and even a Little Tree air freshener. It has a cloaking display on its underside which is strikingly similar to the MCU S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier cloaking. (And this came out the year before The Avengers, I’m just sayin’.)

The north pole houses the command-and-control center, which Steve manages. Thousands of elves manage workstations here, and there is a huge shared display for focusing and informing the team at once when necessary. Smaller displays help elf teams manage certain geographies. Its interfaces fall to comedy and trope, mostly, but are germane to the story beats

One of the crisis scenarios that this system helps manage is for a “waker,” a child who has awoken and is at risk of spying Santa.

Grandsanta’s outmoded sleigh is named Eve. Its technology is much more from the early 20th century, with switches and dials, buttons and levers. It’s a bit janky and overly complex, but gets the job done.

One notable control on S-1 is this trackball with dark representations of the continents. It appears to be a destination selector, but we do not see it in use. It is remarkable because it is very similar to one of the main interface components in the next candidate movie, The Christmas Chronicles.

Arthur Christmas on imdb.com

The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

The Christmas Chronicles follows two kids who stowaway on Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. His surprise when they reveal themselves causes him to lose his magical hat and wreck his sleigh. They help him recover the items, finish his deliveries, and (well, of course) save Christmas just in time.

Santa’s sleight enables him to teleport to any place on earth. The main control is a trackball location selector. Once he spins it and confirms that the city readout looks correct, he can press the “GO” button for a portal to open in the air just ahead of the sleigh. After traveling in a aurora borealis realm filled with famous landmarks for a bit, another portal appears. They pass through this and appear at the selected location. A small magnifying glass above the selection point helps with precision.

Santa wears a watch that measures not time, but Christmas spirit, which ranges from 0 to 100. In the bottom half, chapter rings and a magnifying window seem designed to show the date, with 12 and 31 sequential numbers, respectively. It’s not clear why it shows mid May. A hemisphere in the middle of the face looks like it’s almost a globe, which might be a nice way to display and change time zone, but that may be wishful thinking on my part.

Santa also has a tracking device for finding his sack of toys. (Apparently this has happened enough time to warrant such a thing.) It is an intricate filligree over a cool green and blue glass. A light within blinks faster the closer the sphere is to the sack.

Since he must finish delivering toys before Christmas morning, the dashboard has a countdown clock with Nixie tube numbers showing hours, minutes, and milliseconds. They ordinary glow a cyan, but when time runs out, they turn red and blink.

This Santa also manages his list in a large book with lovely handwritten calligraphy. The kids whose gifts remain undelivered glow golden to draw his attention.

The Christmas Chronicles on imdb.com

So…who did it better?

The hard problem here is that there is a lot of apples-to-oranges comparisons to do. Even though the mythos seems pretty locked down, each movie takes liberties with one or two aspects. As a result not all these Santas are created equally. Calvin’s elves know he is completely new to his job and will need support. Christmas Chronicles Santa has perfect memory, magical abilities, and handles nearly all the delivery duties himself, unless he’s enacting a clever scheme to impart Christmas wisdom. Arthur Christmas has intergenerational technology and Santas who may not be magic at all, but fully know their duty from their youths but rely on a huge army of shock troop elves to make things happen. So it’s hard to name just one. But absent a point-by-point detailed analysis, there are two that really stand out to me.

The weathered surface of this camouflage button is delightful (Arthur Christmas).

Coverage of goals

Arthur Christmas movie has, by far, the most interfaces of any of the candidates, and more coverage of the Santa-family’s goals. Managing noisy pets? Check? Dealing with wakers? Check. Navigating the globe? Check. As far as thinking through speculative technology that assists its Santa, this film has the most.

Keeping the holiday spirit

I’ll confess, though, that extradiegetically, one of the purposes of annual holidays is to mark the passage of time. By trying to adhere to traditions as much as we can, time and our memory is marked by those things that we cannot control (like, say, a pandemic keeping everyone at home and hanging with friends and family virtually). So for my money, the thoroughly modern interfaces that flood Arthur Christmas don’t work that well. They’re so modern they’re not…Christmassy. Grandsanta’s sleigh Eve points to an older tradition, but it’s also clearly framed as outdated in the context of the story.

Gorgeous steampunkish binocular HUD from The Christmas Chronicles 2, which was not otherwise included in this post.

Compare this to The Christmas Chronicles, with its gorgeous steampunk-y interfaces that combine a sense of magic and mechanics. These are things that a centuries-old Santa would have built and use. They feel rooted in tradition while still helping Santa accomplish as many of his goals as he needs (in the context of his Christmas adventure for the stowaway kids). These interfaces evoke a sense of wonder, add significantly to the worldbuilding, and which I’d rather have as a model for magical interfaces in the real world.

Of course it’s a personal call, given the differences, but The Christmas Chronicles wins in my book.

Ho, Ho, HEH.

For those that celebrate Santa-Christmas, I hope it’s a happy one, given the strange, strange state of the world. May you be on the nice list.

For more Who Did it Better, see the tag.

Agent Ross’ remote piloting

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Remote operation appears twice during Black Panther. This post describes the second, in which CIA Agent Ross remote-pilots the Talon in order to chase down cargo airships carrying Killmonger’s war supplies. The prior post describes the first, in which Shuri remotely drives an automobile.

In this sequence, Shuri equips Ross with kimoyo beads and a bone-conducting communication chip, and tells him that he must shoot down the cargo ships down before they cross beyond the Wakandan border. As soon as she tosses a remote-control kimoyo bead onto the Talon, Griot announces to Ross in the lab “Remote piloting system activated” and creates a piloting seat out of vibranium dust for him. Savvy watchers may wonder at this, since Okoye pilots the thing by meditation and Ross would have no meditation-pilot training, but Shuri explains to him, “I made it American style for you. Get in!” He does, grabs the sparkly black controls, and gets to business.

The most remarkable thing to me about the interface is how seamlessly the Talon can be piloted by vastly different controls. Meditation brain control? Can do. Joystick-and-throttle? Just as can do.

Now, generally, I have a beef with the notion of hyperindividualized UI tailoring—it prevents vital communication across a community of practice (read more about my critique of this goal here)—but in this case, there is zero time for Ross to learn a new interface. So sure, give him a control system with which he feels comfortable to handle this emergency. It makes him feel more at ease.

The mutable nature of the controls tells us that there is a robust interface layer that is interpreting whatever inputs the pilot supplies and applying them to the actuators in the Talon. More on this below. Spoiler: it’s Griot.

Too sparse HUD

The HUD presents a simple circle-in-a-triangle reticle that lights up red when a target is in sights. Otherwise it’s notably empty of augmentation. There’s no tunnel in the sky display to describe the ideal path, or proximity warnings about skyscrapers, or airspeed indicator, or altimeter, or…anything. This seems a glaring omission since we can be certain other “American-style” airships have such things. More on why this might be below, but spoiler: It’s Griot.

What do these controls do, exactly?

I take no joy in gotchas. That said…

  • When Ross launches the Talon, he does so by pulling the right joystick backward.
  • When he shoots down the first cargo ship over Birnin Zana, he pushes the same joystick forward as he pulls the trigger, firing energy weapons.

Why would the same control do both? It’s hard to believe it’s modal. Extradiegetically, this is probably an artifact of actor Martin Freeman’s just doing what feels dramatic, but for a real-world equivalent I would advise against having physical controls have wholly different modes on the same grip, lest we risk confusing pilots on mission-critical tasks. But spoiler…oh, you know where this is going.

It’s Griot

Diegetically, Shuri is flat-out wrong that Ross is an experienced pilot. But she also knew that it didn’t matter, because her lab has him covered anyway. Griot is an AI with a brain interface, and can read Ross’ intentions, handling all the difficult execution itself.

This would also explain the lack of better HUD augmentation. That absence seems especially egregious considering that the first cargo ship was flying over a crowded city at the time it was being targeted. If Ross had fired in the wrong place, the cargo ship might have crashed into a building, or down to the bustling city street, killing people. But, instead, Griot quietly, precisely targets the ship for him, to insure that it would crash safely in nearby water.

This would also explain how wildly different interfaces can control the Talon with similar efficacy.

An stained-glass image of William of Ockham. A modern blackletter caption reads, “It was always Griot.”

So, Occams-apology says, yep, it’s Griot.

An AI-wizard did it?

In the post about Shuri’s remote driving, I suggested that Griot was also helping her execute driving behind the scenes. This hearkens back to both the Iron HUD and Doctor Strange’s Cloak of Levitation. It could be that the MCU isn’t really worrying about the details of its enabling technologies, or that this is a brilliant model for our future relationship with technology. Let us feel like heroes, and let the AI manage all the details. I worry that I’m building myself into a wizard-did-it pattern, inserting AI for wizard. Maybe that’s worth another post all its own.

But there is one other thing about Ross’ interface worth noting.

The sonic overload

When the last of the cargo ships is nearly at the border, Ross reports to Shuri that he can’t chase it, because Killmonger-loyal dragon flyers have “got me trapped with some kind of cables.” She instructs him to, “Make an X with your arms!” He does. A wing-like display appears around him, confirming its readiness.

Then she shouts, “Now break it!” he does, and the Talon goes boom shaking off the enemy ships, allowing Ross to continue his pursuit.

First, what a great gesture for this function. Very ordinarily, Wakandans are piloting the Talon, and each of them would be deeply familiar with this gesture, and even prone to think of it when executing a hail Mary move like this.

Second, when an outsider needed to perform the action, why didn’t she just tell Griot to just do it? If there’s an interpretation layer in the system, why not just speak directly to that controller? It might be so the human knows how to do it themselves next time, but this is the last cargo ship he’s been tasked with chasing, and there’s little chance of his officially joining the Wakandan air force. The emergency will be over after this instance. Maybe Wakandans have a principle that they are first supposed to engage the humans before bringing in the machines, but that’s heavy conjecture.

Third, I have a beef about gestures—there’s often zero affordances to tell users what gestures they can do, and what effects those gestures will have. If Shuri was not there to answer Ross’ urgent question, would the mission have just…failed? Seems like a bad design.

How else could have known he could do this? If Griot is on board, Griot could have mentioned it. But avoiding the wizard-did-it solutions, some sort of context-aware display could detect that the ship is tethered to something, and display the gesture on the HUD for him. This violates the principle of letting the humans be the heroes, but would be a critical inclusion in any similar real-world system.

Any time we are faced with “intuitive” controls that don’t map 1:1 to the thing being controlled, we’re faced with similar problems. (We’ve seen the same problems in Sleep Dealer and Lost in Space (1998). Maybe that’s worth its own write-up.) Some controls won’t map to anything. More problematic is that there will be functions which don’t have controls. Designers can’t rely on having a human cavalry like Shuri there to save the day, and should take steps to find ways that the system can inform users of how to activate those functions.

Fit to purpose?

I’ve had to presume a lot about this interface. But if those things are correct, then, sure, this mostly makes it possible for Ross, a novice to piloting, to contribute something to the team mission, while upholding the directive that AI Cannot Be Heroes.

If Griot is not secretly driving, and that directive not really a thing, then the HUD needs more work, I can’t diegetically explain the controls, and they need to develop just-in-time suggestions to patch the gap of the mismatched interface. 

Black Georgia Matters

Each post in the Black Panther review is followed by actions that you can take to support black lives. As this critical special election is still coming up, this is a repeat of the last one, modified to reflect passed deadlines.

The state flag of Georgia, whose motto clearly violates the doctrine of separation of church and state.
Always on my mind, or at least until July 06.

Despite outrageous, anti-democratic voter suppression by the GOP, for the first time in 28 years, Georgia went blue for the presidential election, verified with two hand recounts. Credit to Stacey Abrams and her team’s years of effort to get out the Georgian—and particularly the powerful black Georgian—vote.

But the story doesn’t end there. Though the Biden/Harris ticket won the election, if the Senate stays majority red, Moscow Mitch McConnell will continue the infuriating obstructionism with which he held back Obama’s efforts in office for eight years. The Republicans will, as they have done before, ensure that nothing gets done.

To start to undo the damage the fascist and racist Trump administration has done, and maybe make some actual progress in the US, we need the Senate majority blue. Georgia is providing that opportunity. Neither of the wretched Republican incumbents got 50% of the vote, resulting in a special runoff election January 5, 2021. If these two seats go to the Democratic challengers, Warnock and Ossof, it will flip the Senate blue, and the nation can begin to seriously right the sinking ship that is America.

Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

What can you do?

If you live in Georgia, vote blue, of course. You can check your registration status online. You can also help others vote. Important dates to remember, according to the Georgia website…

  • 14 DEC Early voting begins
  • 05 JAN 2021 Final day of voting

Residents can also volunteer to become a canvasser for either of the campaigns, though it’s a tough thing to ask in the middle of the raging pandemic.

The rest of us (yes, even non-American readers) can contribute either to the campaigns directly using the links above, or to Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight campaign. From the campaign’s web site:

We promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage voter participation in elections, and educate voters about elections and their voting rights. Fair Fight brings awareness to the public on election reform, advocates for election reform at all levels, and engages in other voter education programs and communications.

We will continue moving the country into the anti-racist future regardless of the runoff, but we can make much, much more progress if we win this election. Please join the efforts as best you can even as you take care of yourself and your loved ones over the holidays. So very much depends on it.

Black Reparations Matter

This is timely, so I’m adding this on as well rather than waiting for the next post: A bill is in the house to set up a commission to examine the institution of slavery and its impact and make recommendations for reparations to Congress. If you are an American citizen, please consider sending a message to your congresspeople asking them to support the bill.

Image, uncredited, from the ACLU site. Please contact me if you know the artist.

On this ACLU site you will find a form and suggested wording to help you along.

Vibranium sand tables

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There are a number of vibranium sand tables seen in Black Panther.

  1. The horseshoe-shaped shelf in which Okoye sits as she pilots the Royal Talon. (We never see it activated.)
  2. The small sand table in the center of the Royal Talon.
  3. The big sand tables in Shuri’s lab.

You can see the Royal Talon one in the post about piloting that craft. The other two are described below.

All of these build on the given that vibranium is a very powerful substance and that Wakanda’s scientists have managed to gain a very, very sophisticated control over it.

In the Talon

This table is about a meter square, and raised off the floor around knee-height. As Okoye and T’Challa approach the traffickers in the Sambisa Forest, T’Challa approaches the table and it springs to life, showing him real-time model of the traffickers’ vehicle train. T’Challa picks up the model of the small transport truck and with a finger, wipes off its roof, revealing that there are over a dozen people huddled within. One of the figures glows amber. (It’s Nakia.) He places the truck back into the display, and the display collapses back to inert sand.

A quick critique of this interaction. The sand highlights Nakia for T’Challa, but why did it wait for him to find her truck and wipe off the top of it to look inside? It knew his goals (find Nakia), can clearly conduct a scan into the vehicle, and understood the context (she’s in one of those trucks), it should not wait for him to pick up each car and scrape off its roof to check and see which one she was in. The interface should have drawn his attention to the truck it knew she was in. This is a “stoic guru” mistake that I’ve critiqued before. You know, the computer knows all, but only tells you when you ask it. It is much more sensible for the transport truck to be glowing from the moment the table goes live, as in the comp below.

Designers: Don’t wait for users to ask just the the right thing at the right time.

Otherwise, this is a good high-tech use of the sand table for the more common meaning of “sand table,” which is a 3-dimensional surface for understanding a theatre of conflict. It doesn’t really help him run through scenarios, testing various tactics, but T’Challa is a warrior king, he can do all that in his head.

The interaction also nicely blurs the line between display and gestural interactive tool, in the same way that the Prometheus astrometrics display did. Like that other example, it would be useful for the display to distinguish when it is representing reality, and when the display is being interrupted or modified. Also, T’Challa is nice enough to put the truck back where it “belongs,” but a design would also need to handle how to respond when T’Challa put the truck back in the wrong place, or, say, crushed the truck model with his hand in fury.

In Prometheus it was an Earth, not a truck, but still focused on Africa.

Shuri’s lab

The largest table we see in the movie is in Shuri’s lab. After Black Panther challenges Killmonger and engages in battle outside the capital city, Shuri, Nakia, and Agent Ross rush down to the lab. As they approach an edge-lit hexagonal table, the vibranium sand lowers to reveal 3D-printed armor and weaponry for Shuri and Nakia to join the fight. (Though it’s not like modern 3D printing, these are powered weapons and kimoyo beads, items with very sophisticated functionality.)

Shuri outfits Ross with kimoyo beads from the print and takes off to join the fight. In the lab, the table creates a seat for Ross to remote-pilot the Royal Talon. Up on the flight deck, Shuri throws a control bead onto the Talon, and an AI in the lab named Griot announces to Agent Ross, “Remote piloting system activated.” (Hey, Trevor Noah, we hear you there!)

Around the seat, a volumetric projection of the Talon appears around him, including a 360° display just beyond the windshield that gives him a very immersive remote flying experience. We hear Shuri’s voice explain to Ross “I made it American Style for you. Get in!”

Ross sits down, grabs joystick controls, and begins remote-chasing down the cargo ships that are carrying munitions to Killmonger’s War Dogs around the world. (The piloting controls and HUD for Ross are a separate issue, and will be handled in their own post.)

The moment that Ross pilots the Talon through the last cargo ship, the volumetric projection disappears and the piloting seat returns to sand, ungraciously plopping Ross down the floor level of the lab.

It is in this shot that we realize that the dark tiles of the lab’s floor are all recessed vibranium sand tables. I can count seven in the shot. So the lab is full of them.

Display material

Let’s talk for a bit about the display choices. Vibranium can change to display any color and a shape down to a fine level of detail. See the screen cap below for an example of perfectly lifelike (if scaled) representation.

This is a vibranium-powered volumetric display.
It raises the gaze matching issues we’ve seen before.

So why would it be designed so that in most cases, the display is sparkly and black like black tourmaline? Wouldn’t the truck that T’Challa picks up be most useful if it was photographically rendered? Wouldn’t the remote piloting chair be more comfortable if it had pleather- and silicone-like surfaces?

Extradiegetically, I understand the reason is because art direction. We want Wakandan tech to be visibly different than other tech in the MCU, and having it look like vibranium dust ties it back to that key plot element.

But, per the stance of this blog, I try to look for a diegetic reason. It might be a deliberate reminder of the resource on which their technological fortunes are built. And as the Okoye VP above shows, they aren’t purists about it. When detail is needed, it’s included. So perhaps this is it. That implies a great deal of sophistication on the part of the displays to know when photorealism is needed and when it is not, but the presence of Griot there tells us that they have something approaching general AI.

Missing interactions

So, just like I had to do for the Royal Talon, I have to throw my hands up about reviewing the interactions with the sand tables, because we don’t see the interactions that would give these results.

How were the mission goals communicated to the Royal Talon table? Is it programmed to activate when someone approaches it, or did T’Challa issue a mental command? How did Shuri specify those weapons and that armor? What did she do to make the ship “American style” for Ross? Is that a template? Was it Griot’s interpretation of her intention? Why did the remote piloting seat vanish the moment the mission was complete? Was this something Shuri set up in advance, or Griot’s way of telling Agent Ross to GTFO for his own safety? How does someone in the lab instruct a floor tile to leap up and become a table and do stuff? It’s almost certainly via mental commands through the kimoyo beads, but that’s conjecture. The film really provides little evidence.

On the one hand, this is appropriate for us mere non-Wakandans observing the most technologically advanced society on earth. Much of it would feel like inexplicable magic to us.

On the other, sci-fi routinely introduces us to advanced technologies, and doesn’t always eschew the explanatory interactions, so the absence is notable here. It’s magic.

Black Lives Matter

Each post in the Black Panther review is followed by actions that you can take to support black lives.

In the last post we grieved Chadwick Boseman’s passing. This week we’re grieving the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. May her memory be a blessing. With her loss, the GOP is ratcheting up its outrageous hypocrisy by reversing a precedent that they themselves established when Obama was president. The “Moscow Mitch Rule” (oh, oops, sorry) “McConnell Rule” was that new Justices should not be appointed within a year of a general election, so the people’s voice can be taken into account. Of course, the bastards are just ignoring that now and trying to ram through one of their own before election day. This Justice will certainly be a conservative, and we know with this administration that means reactionary, loyal to tiny-hand Twittler, and racist as a Jim Crow law.

There are a few arrows in citizen’s quivers to stop this. One is to convince at least 4 Republican Senators to reject this outright hypocrisy, put country over party, and adhere to the McConnell rule.

Brilliant image by Jesse Duquette

To help put pressure where it might work, you can leave voicemails with Republican Senators who may be mulling whether to put country over party. Those 6 Senators’ names and numbers are below. Here’s a script for your message:

Hello, my name is ______. In 2016, Mitch McConnell created the principle of not confirming a Supreme Court Justice in an election year until after the next inauguration. For the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of the people, I’m asking Senator ________ to uphold that principle by refusing to confirm a new Justice until after a new President is installed. Thank you.

—You, hopefully
  • Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; (202) 224-6665
  • Mitt Romney, Utah: (202) 224-5251
  • Susan Collins, Maine: (202) 224-2523
  • Martha McSally, Arizona: (202) 224-2235
  • Cory Gardner, Colorado: (202) 224-5941
  • Chuck Grassley, Iowa: (202) 224-3744

I’ve made my calls and left my messages. Can you do the same to stop the hypocritical Trumpian power grab that would tip the Supreme Court for generations?

UPDATE: Nevermind. Romney caved.

The Royal Talon piloting interface

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Since my last post, news broke that Chadwick Boseman has passed away after a four year battle with cancer. He kept his struggles private, so the news was sudden and hard-hitting. The fandom is still reeling. Black people, especially, have lost a powerful, inspirational figure. The world has also lost a courageous and talented young actor. Rise in Power, Mr. Boseman. Thank you for your integrity, bearing, and strength.

Photo CC BY-SA 2.0,
by Gage Skidmore.

Black Panther’s airship is a triangular vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle called the Royal Talon. We see its piloting interface twice in the film.

The first time is near the beginning of the movie. Okoye and T’Challa are flying at night over the Sambisa forest in Nigeria. Okoye sits in the pilot’s seat in a meditative posture, facing a large forward-facing bridge window with a heads up display. A horseshoe-shaped shelf around her is filled with unactivated vibranium sand. Around her left wrist, her kimoyo beads glow amber, projecting a volumetric display around her forearm.

She announces to T’Challa, “My prince, we are coming up on them now.” As she disengages from the interface, retracting her hands from the pose, the kimoyo projection shifts and shrinks. (See more detail in the video clip, below.)

The second time we see it is when they pick up Nakia and save the kidnapped girls. On their way back to Wakanda we see Okoye again in the pilot’s seat. No new interactions are seen in this scene though we linger on the shot from behind, with its glowing seatback looking like some high-tech spine.

Now, these brief glimpses don’t give a review a lot to go on. But for a sake of completeness, let’s talk about that volumetric projection around her wrist. I note is that it is a lovely echo of Dr. Strange’s interface for controlling the time stone Eye of Agamatto.

Wrist projections are going to be all the rage at the next Snap, I predict.

But we never really see Okoye look at this VP it or use it. Cross referencing the Wakandan alphabet, those five symbols at the top translate to 1 2 K R I, which doesn’t tell us much. (It doesn’t match the letters seen on the HUD.) It might be a visual do-not-disturb signal to onlookers, but if there’s other meaning that the letters and petals are meant to convey to Okoye, I can’t figure it out. At worst, I think having your wrist movements of one hand emphasized in your peripheral vision with a glowing display is a dangerous distraction from piloting. Her eyes should be on the “road” ahead of her.

The image has been flipped horizontally to illustrate how Okoye would see the display.

Similarly, we never get a good look at the HUD, or see Okoye interact with it, so I’ve got little to offer other than a mild critique that it looks full of pointless ornamental lines, many of which would obscure things in her peripheral vision, which is where humans need the most help detecting things other than motion. But modern sci-fi interfaces generally (and the MCU in particular) are in a baroque period, and this is partly how audiences recognize sci-fi-ness.

I also think that requiring a pilot to maintain full lotus to pilot is a little much, but certainly, if there’s anyone who can handle it, it’s the leader of the Dora Milaje.

One remarkable thing to note is that this is the first brain-input piloting interface in the survey. Okoye thinks what she wants the ship to do, and it does it. I expect, given what we know about kimoyo beads in Wakanda (more on these in a later post), what’s happening is she is sending thoughts to the bracelet, and the beads are conveying the instructions to the ship. As a way to show Okoye’s self-discipline and Wakanda’s incredible technological advancement, this is awesome.

Unfortunately, I don’t have good models for evaluating this interaction. And I have a lot of questions. As with gestural interfaces, how does she avoid a distracted thought from affecting the ship? Why does she not need a tunnel-in-the-sky assist? Is she imagining what the ship should do, or a route, or something more abstract, like her goals? How does the ship grant her its field awareness for a feedback loop? When does the vibranium dashboard get activated? How does it assist her? How does she hand things off to the autopilot? How does she take it back? Since we don’t have good models, and it all happens invisibly, we’ll have to let these questions lie. But that’s part of us, from our less-advanced viewpoint, having to marvel at this highly-advanced culture from the outside.

Black Health Matters

Each post in the Black Panther review is followed by actions that you can take to support black lives.

Thinking back to the terrible loss of Boseman: Fuck cancer. (And not to imply that his death was affected by this, but also:) Fuck the racism that leads to worse medical outcomes for black people.

One thing you can do is to be aware of the diseases that disproportionately affect black people (diabetes, asthma, lung scarring, strokes, high blood pressure, and cancer) and be aware that no small part of these poorer outcomes is racism, systemic and individual. Listen to Dorothy Roberts’ TED talk, calling for an end to race-based medicine.

If you’re the reading sort, check out the books Black Man in a White Coat by Damon Tweedy, or the infuriating history covered in Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington.

If you are black, in Boseman’s memory, get screened for cancer as often as your doctor recommends it. If you think you cannot afford it and you are in the USA, this CDC website can help you determine your eligibility for free or low-cost screening: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/nbccedp/screenings.htm. If you live elsewhere, you almost certainly have a better healthcare system than we do, but a quick search should tell you your options.

Cancer treatment is equally successful for all races. Yet black men have a 40% higher cancer death rate than white men and black women have a 20% higher cancer death rate than white women. Your best bet is to detect it early and get therapy started as soon as possible. We can’t always win that fight, but better to try than to find out when it’s too late to intervene. Your health matters. Your life matters.

Dr. Strange’s augmented reality surgical assistant

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We’re actually done with all of the artifacts from Doctor Strange. But there’s one last kind-of interface that’s worth talking about, and that’s when Strange assists with surgery on his own body.

After being shot with a soul-arrow by the zealot, Strange is in bad shape. He needs medical attention. He recovers his sling ring and creates a portal to the emergency room where he once worked. Stumbling with the pain, he manages to find Dr. Palmer and tell her he has a cardiac tamponade. They head to the operating theater and get Strange on the table.

DoctorStrange_AR_ER_assistant-02.png

When Strange passes out, his “spirit” is ejected from his body as an astral projection. Once he realizes what’s happened, he gathers his wits and turns to observe the procedure.

DoctorStrange_AR_ER_assistant-05.png

When Dr. Palmer approaches his body with a pericardiocentesis needle, Strange manifests so she can sense him and recommends that she aim “just a little higher.” At first she is understandably scared, but once he explains what’s happening, she gets back to business, and he acts as a virtual coach.

Continue reading →

Jefferson Projection

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SWHS-musicVP-01

When Imperial troopers intrude to search the house, one of the bullying officers takes interest in a device sitting on the dining table. It’s the size of a sewing machine, with a long handle along the top. It has a set of thumb toggles along the top, like old cassette tape recorder buttons.

Saun convinces the officer to sit down, stretches the thin script with a bunch of pointless fiddling of a volume slider and pantomimed delays, and at last fumbles the front of the device open. Hinged at the bottom like a drawbridge, it exposes a small black velvet display space. Understandably exasperated, the officer stands up to shout, “Will you get on with it?” Saun presses a button on the opened panel, and the searing chord of an electric guitar can be heard at once.

SWHS-musicVP-04

Inside the drawbridge-space a spot of pink light begins to glow, and mesmerized officer who, moments ago was bent on brute intimidation, but now spends the next five minutes and 23 seconds grinning dopily at the volumetric performance by Jefferson Starship.

During the performance, 6 lights link in a pattern in the upper right hand corner of the display. When the song finishes, the device goes silent. No other interactions are seen with it.

tappa

Many questions. Why is there a whole set of buttons to open the thing? Is this the only thing it can play? If not, how do you select another performance?Is it those unused buttons on the top? Why are the buttons unlabeled? Is Jefferson Starship immortal? How is it that they have only aged in the long, long time since this was recorded? Or was this volumetric recording somehow sent back in time?  Where is the button that Saun pressed to start the playback? If there was no button, and it was the entire front panel, why doesn’t it turn on and off while the officer taps (see above)? What do the little lights do other than distract? Why is the glow pink rather than Star-Wars-standard blue? Since volumetric projections are most often free-floating, why does this appear in a lunchbox? Since there already exists ubiquitous display screens, why would anyone haul this thing around? How does this officer keep his job?

Perhaps it’s best that these questions remain unanswered. For if anything were substantially different, we would risk losing this image, of the silhouette of the lead singer and his microphone. Humanity would be the poorer for it.

SWHS-musicVP-09

Avengers, assembly!

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Avengers-lookatthis.png

When Coulson hands Tony a case file, it turns out to be an exciting kind of file. For carrying, it’s a large black slab. After Tony grabs it, he grabs the long edges and pulls in opposite directions. One part is a thin translucent screen that fits into an angled slot in the other part, in a laptop-like configuration, right down to a built-in keyboard.

The grip edge

The grip edge of the screen is thicker than the display, so it has a clear, physical affordance as to what part is meant to be gripped and how to pull it free from its casing, and simultaneously what end goes into the base. It’s simple and obvious. The ribbing on the grip unfortunately runs parallel to the direction of pull. It would make for a better grip and a better affordance if the grip was perpendicular to the direction of pull. Minor quibble.

I’d be worried about the ergonomics of an unadjustable display. I’d be worried about the display being easily unseated or dislodged. I’d also be worried about the strength of the join. Since there’s no give, enough force on the display might snap it clean off. But then again this is a world where “vibrium steel” exists, so material critiques may not be diegetically meaningful.

Login

Once he pulls the display from the base, the screen boops and animated amber arcs spin around the screen, signalling him to login via a rectangular panel on the right hand side of the screen. Tony puts his four fingers in the spot and drags down. A small white graphic confirms his biometrics. As a result, a WIMP display appears in grays and amber colors.

Avengers-asset-browser05

Briefing materials

One window on the left hand side shows a keypad, and he enters 1-8-5-4. The keypad disappears and a series of thumbnail images—portraits of members of the Avengers initiative—appear in its place. Pepper asks Tony, “What is all this?” Tony replies, saying, “This is, uh…” and in a quick gesture, places his ten fingertips on the screen at the portraits, and then throws his hands outward, off the display.

The portraits slide offscreen to become ceiling-height volumetric windows filled with rich media dossiers on Thor, Steve Rogers, and David Banner. There are videos, portraits, schematics, tables of data, cellular graphics, and maps. There’s a smaller display near the desktop where the “file” rests about the tesseract. (More on this bit in the next post.)

Briefing.gif

Insert standard complaint here about the eye strain that a translucent display causes, and the apology that yes, I understand it’s an effective and seemingly high-tech way to show actors and screens simultaneously. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

The two-part login shows an understanding of multifactor authentication—a first in the survey, so props for that. Tony must provide something he “is”, i.e. his fingerprints, and something he knows, i.e. the passcode. Only then does the top secret information become available.

I have another standard grouse about the screen providing no affordances that content has an alternate view available, and that a secret gesture summons that view. I’d also ordinarily critique the displays for having nearly no visual hierarchy, i.e. no way for your eyes to begin making sense of it, and a lot of pointless-motion noise that pulls your attention in every which way.

But, this beat is about the wonder of the technology, the breadth of information SHIELD in its arsenal, and the surprise of familiar tech becoming epic, so I’m giving it a narrative pass.

Also, OK, Tony’s a universe-class hacker, so maybe he’s just knowledgeable/cocky enough to not need the affordances and turned them off. All that said, in my due diligence: Affordances still matter, people.

Holomax

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In the town square, Marty is quite surprised by a volumetric advertisement for “JAWS 19.”

BttF_045

The crude-geometry shape of a cartoon shark emerges from a projection space above the cinema, billed as “Holomax,” looms large above him, and then bends down to envelop him in its jaws before disappearing in a scattering of triangles. As a piece of interactive advertising it works well for being activated by a common urban activity, and then delivering an intense experience that is easily identified after the fact as illusory, and promising the same but more in the full volumetric moving picture experience.