The “spectacular” suicide experience from Soylent Green

13 Sep 2022 by Christopher Noessel

The thanatorium is a speculative service for assisted suicide in Soylent Green. Suicide and death are not easy topics and I will do my best to address them seriously. Let me first take a moment to direct anyone who is considering or dealing with suicide to please stop reading this and talk to someone about it. I am unqualified to address—and this blog is not the place to work through—such issues.

There are four experiences to look at in the interface and service design of the Thanatorium: The patient, their beneficiaries, the usher to the beneficiaries, and the attendants to the patient. This post is about the patient themselves. Since there aren’t any technological interfaces, this will be a review of the service design from the patient’s and Soylent’s perspectives. If you’re only into this blog for technological interfaces, this is a post to skip, as it’s going to be about set design, lighting, props, signage, and ritual design, among other things.

Sol’s goals

Part of how we measure the efficacy of an experience is by checking whether it helps its user achieve their goals in the ways they would like them achieved. So let’s say that Sol’s goals are to take advantage of the service to have a good death, i.e. to pass painlessly and with dignity, and to have his belongings passed along according to his wishes. He wants psychological comfort as well, which in this case means helping him psychologically transition from the world he is leaving behind by setting up a liminal space for the ceremony, pointing toward notions of eternity and away from the horrible world he is leaving.

“People,” you say? Yeah, screw that. I’m out.

We are going to completely bypass the script question here about why Sol doesn’t bother to communicate to Thorn the Dark Secret in his goodbye note, but then does tell him when he happens to join him at the Thanatorium. That is what it is.

Sol’s experience

After Sol learns that his options are cannibalism or starvation, he makes the decision to die with dignity. To enact this wish, he dresses in his Sunday best, heads to the state-sponsored Thanatorium, officed in a low-rise building at the end of a wide street in downtown New York City.

Authors Islam Abohela and Noel Lavin insightfully note in their 2020 paper, The Height of Future Architecture: Significance of High versus Low Rise Architecture in Science Fiction Films, that the horizontality of this building contrasts earlier, vertical sci-fi visions of the cityscape as lofty and aspirational. In short, the building is in a horizontal repose suitable to its purpose. Further, the bright illumination spilling out from its frosted-glass doors onto the street helps to sell its next-world-ly promise, especially as the terminus of a dark road.

Initial greeting

At Sol’s approach a young worker opens the door and welcomes him. (How did she know of his approach, given the frosted glass? Let’s presume cameras, though we see no hint of this.)

With the door open, Sol feels the air conditioning pouring from inside and says, “It feels good.” She replies, “Yes, sir. Won’t you please come in?” He hesitates a moment with the gravity of it, but proceeds. Inside he walks through a turnstile and the greeter escorts him to one of the intake queues.

Worldbuilding question: The New York City of Soylent Green is oppressively hot and overcrowded. You would imagine that people would want to feel that refreshing cool air themselves, even if they weren’t there to suicide. I would expect people to be laying on the sidewalk there near the doors on the off-chance to feel a cool breeze. But the street leading to the Thanatorium is vacant. Why is this so? You might think well, it’s an authoritarian state, and curfew is probably enforced brutally. But then why is Sol allowed to just amble his way there? It would have been a nice beat to have seen Sol approached by an angry cop and challenged, only to have Sol point up the street to the Thanatorium, to which the cop softens and nods, allowing Sol to continue. This would have signaled that, despite curfew, the Thanatorium is open 24 hours a day, 7 days for “business.”

Intake

Taking a moment to appreciate the set design, the placid blues and non-descript “plop art” backdrops sell this space as a hospital rather than, say, an airport terminal, or church. It could have gone all “heavenly gate” but that would have been too soon in the patient experience, and lacked the personalized immersion that leads to…uh…the ecstasy meat (a gross, backworlded concept introduced in the beneficiaries post). The service keeps its powder dry to maximize that main event and thereby its output. So this design wins for being both familiar to the patients and effective for Soylent.

The film cuts away to show Thorn returning home to find Sol’s goodbye letter, and then running to the Thanatorium. When we cut back to Sol, he is in the middle of answering some questions by the intake staff, i.e. His favorite color and genre of music. Sol responds and the intake personnel marks his answers on a reusable plastic form. Before signing, Sol wants to confirm that the ceremony will last, “A full 20 minutes?”

“Certainly,” comes the reply, “Guaranteed.”

This scriptwriting moment bears a mention. This comes across as a negotiation, but what is being exchanged here? And what could Sol do with a guarantee when he won’t be there in case this mustache reneges on the deal? Nothing, of course, but it really sets up the transactional nature here. One’s death is so cheap in the world of Soylent Green that one can use it as a bargaining chip. Dark.

There’s a lot that we don’t get to examine in this intake experience because the scene is cut, but per Sol’s goals identified above, we have to imagine it would include questions about his beneficiaries and privacy. Additional questions appear in the text below.

Theater 11

The usher comes and retrieves Sol, making small talk and escorting him down halls, past the beneficiaries’ observation room, to “theater 11,” which is the death chamber to which he’s been assigned, with attendants waiting there standing aside a bed in the center of the room. The inclusion of “11” reminds us that there are many such theaters in the Thanatorium. It would have been nice for the beneficiaries only room to have had a similar number, i.e. “Observation 11: beneficiaries only,” linking the two together for the users and the audience.

We’ll get back to Sol’s experience in a moment, but first a note on the floor markings and the architecture.

I first thought the red line on the floor might have been wayfinding lines like you see in some hospitals. If it was a particularly busy day, and the patient ambulatory, the intake personnel could say, “Follow the red line on the floor to theater 11.” But, a glance at the scenes that precede this show that these markings are only present in the antechamber leading into the theater and the theater itself. So it serves as more of a decoration, a red line leading to a red circle in the middle of which is a white gray, and black circle. The end of the line in two senses.

This sense of the terminus is reinforced by the design of the room. The small passageway down which Sol walks joins with the more expansive theater, creating a sort of “reverse womb” implying a balance between the beginning and end of life. It’s not critical that patients pick up on any of this, of course, but all contributes to a sense of liminality; of interest to both Sol and Soylent.

So all good, but I wish the lighting here had echoed the approach to the building. It should have been a glowing pool of light at the end of a dark passageway, rather than the even overhead lighting reminiscent of a school cafeteria that we see in the film. Pools of light in the center combined with many flickering pinpoints of light at the periphery would have increased the sense of other-worldliness and unified the approach to the building with the entrance to the theater, creating a rhythm of self-similar spectacle. It also would have let the scale of the 180° screen become apparent only once the ceremony started, adding to its thrill and overwhelming scale.

The attendant behavior

In service design, the behavior of the frontstage staff is of particular concern, as humans are good at reading other humans for cues about unfamiliar things. In this case, the attendants are silent, wear beatific expressions, and move with a dance-like deliberateness throughout their parts. It is perhaps the most effective cue-of-transition for the patient. The outfits are a little goofy, but borrow semantically from western Christian liturgy, so are kind-of appropriate. If the patient were atheist or from a different religious tradition, other costumes with different signifiers would be more appropriate.

It’s also of note that not everyone is comfortable with being touched by strangers. It signals a warmth in the scene, but might feel threatening to some patients. Another question to add to the intake questionnaire.

Disrobing

Once Sol is in the theater, the attendants greet him with silent handshakes, lead him to the bed, and begin to help him disrobe. This segment bears many questions.

Why does he need to be naked?

I get why he is disrobed here, from Soylent’s perspective. I’ve never been a mortician, but it does seem that getting the clothes off of a living person would be easier than getting it off a dead person, why make the task harder for Soylent employees down the line? Just work it into the ceremony, some product manager says. And from Sol’s perspective, he’d like to see his clothes being taken away in a nice basket with some assurances that the clothes would be washed and given back to the community; an additional assurance that he’s doing a good, selfless thing in this world with dwindling resources.

But then there are the pants. Maybe it’s me, but there is not a dignified way to remove one’s pants around other, clothed, people. Did they help him out of his pants? Did he do that and just hand the clothes to them? Is he just in his underwear? All of it seems awkward.

I think the service could take a privacy clue from hospitals, public pools, and spas: provide a small room where a patient can undress themselves and switch into a robe. This would also be an opportunity to get a shower, which the movie demonstrates is a cherished luxury in the world of Soylent Green, another reward to lure citizens. Water is in short supply in the world of Soylent Green, but the corpses that are sent en masse to The Exchange for processing don’t get otherwise cleaned, so it would be another nice, hygienic worldbuilding hint.

In the scene, the disrobing is taken as a solemn moment, but Sol is distracted from thinking too hard about it by the appearance of an orange floodlight.

That orange floodlight

During the disrobing, a floodlight of Sol’s favorite color illuminates. I complained briefly about this in the prior post, but what’s causing this light to come on? The usher is back at intake, so it’s not him. Maybe the light is on a timer, but that seems hard for the attendants to manage against the other things that need to happen.

Also, why does it come on at this moment in the ceremony? It might be a deliberate distraction for Sol, meant to focus his attention on the meaning of the ceremony rather than the mundane disrobing, but if so, you might think that the light should illuminate before the disrobing begins. But recall that it’s only happenstance that Sol’s favorite color is the warm and flattering orange. If a patient’s favorite color happened to be blue—which is the most popular color around the world—it would grant everything in theater 11 a cool, detached appearance, and give the patient’s own skin a deathly pallor. Not great for the experience.

Even the second most favored colors aren’t much better. Red looks like danger to western audiences, purple is unflattering, and green looks alien and would be little on-the-nose for the theme. Apologies to my colorblind readers.

Much better would be to keep the custom-color flood light off until the overture begins—when the patient’s attention is not drawn to themselves but focused on the chamber around them—and illuminate it with the rise of the music, in response to the usher’s controls. This would maximize the impact of the color on Sol’s emotional state while not making his own skin and the attendants look off-putting.

Getting onto the bed

Once disrobed, the attendants help Sol onto the bed. How they do this is left off-screen, but it’s a non-trivial problem since as you can see in the screen shot, Sol is 5’7″ and the bed height is well above his waist. Hopefully there’s a set of retractable steps under the bed skirt that can make this accessible to Sol without his having to be hoisted up by the attendants, which would be undignified.

Hemlock

Once in bed, the attendants provide the “hemlock,” (which is what I’m calling the deadly draught they provide in homage to the death of Socrates) and Sol drinks.

We don’t see the glass in the room prior to its being handed to him, but I imagine since this is the point of no return, it bears some attention. Should it be waiting already poured, or should he watch it being poured? Should be pour it himself? If poured, should it be from a gold, porcelain, or glass pitcher? Should there be a tray? Where should all this be staged?

For materials, gold is a good funereal symbol for never tarnishing, but might be too tempting a theft target for poverty-stricken citizens. Stoneware has a nice connotation of being of-the-earth, but is a poor choice for being opaque and here implying its contents are something to be hidden. So I’d recommend a simple glass pitcher that emphasizes clarity. The Toyo pitcher shown below has no handle and so requires two hands to operate, granting a ceremonial, human feel to the act of pouring. While we’re at it, ditch the footed highball glass for a stange or zombie glass to match the pitcher’s simplicity. Have them sitting on an end table on a tray at the side of the bed in their own pool of light and have the attendant pour and hand the glass to the patient. When they depart the chamber one attendant can take the tray out with them for cleaning, and the other can push the end table back under the bed.

Another argument for delaying the floodlight until the overture is that light can change the apparent color of the drink. It just so happens that Sol’s orange flatters the amber color of the draught, but if his favorite color had been, say, red, it might have made the drink look like a wicked ink. Keep the floodlight off to keep the apparent color of the drink something pleasant and unthreatening.

Sol makes no expression in response to the taste of the hemlock, so we have no clue how it’s flavored, but it’s in everyone’s interest that it be palatable, if not pleasant. It would have been a nice touch at intake to ask him to select from a menu of favorite flavors as well, especially to hide the taste of whatever other drugs need to be mixed in.

Once Sol has imbibed the draught, he lies back on the wedge pillow and the attendants draw a sheet up to his chest.

As the orange floodlight dims to a candlelight whisper, Sol waits for the overture to begin as the attendants depart.

Overture

Alone at last, Sol is treated to an audio overture as the drugs work through his system. The music is the principal theme from the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique.” He stares up at the ceiling, bathed in his favorite color, listening to his favorite music unaware that things are about to become even more spectacular.

Cinerama

The overture complete (and, per my ecstasy meat theory, the MDMA and opiates have kicked in) the audio-visual presentation starts. The music changes to the first movement of Beethoven’s “Symphony #6 (The Pastoral),” and a very wide-angle video presentation begins on the wrap-around screen above him, starting with a verdant field of tulips blowing in a breeze.

It later transitions to images of fauna, other flora, wholesome livestock, and sunsets—all romantic scenes of a highly-selective-memory of Earth’s heyday. It’s important to remember that audiences in 1973 may have heard of a Cinerama display like this, but few of them had seen it. And the 180+° screen seen in the film dwarfs the original Cinerama 2.65:1 display ratio. So though folks today may yawn at this in comparison to IMAX or Oculus AR displays, at the time this would have seemed very sci-fi.

From our vantage point, it all seems a little cruel, bathing Sol in scenes of what he cannot have and what for him will never be, but maybe it points at an afterlife where the things you recall fondly will be yours again, in abundance. (Hey that seems like a formula for every afterlife story.) Mixed with the drugs in Sol’s system, it would help flood his mind and body with euphoria and all the pleasant neurotransmitters that entails.

I minimize this gif because it is so freaking distracting, as it would be to users.

At a few minutes into the presentation, the SPEAKING PERMITTED light of the beneficiaries interface begins blinking, and the patient is able to talk to their loved ones. This would interrupt the spectacle of the display, but add a flood of additional emotions (and thereby hormones) from heartfelt declarations of love and farewell. Immediately afterward “Morning Mood” from Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite #1” plays as biophilic videos play: Alpine mountainscapes with grazing donkeys, tarns with floral banks. Finally it segues to scenes depicting the end-of-a-day: A sunset over waves crashing on the black rocks of a pristine West Coast beach, another sun sets through gaps in swiftly drifting clouds.

The screen fades to black as “Aase’s Death” plays from the “Peer Gynt Suite.” In the film, this is the point where Sol shares the Dark Secret and tells Thorn he must go the Exchange and provide proof to the elders. (Ugh. Screenwriters, again, if this was so important, why did he wait until this moment—which he was not sure would come—to convey this information? It makes no sense. But I digress.)

Psst…did you know the namesake of the James Webb telescope was a filthy homophobe? Now you do.

The camera is all close up in their faces for this final beat, so we don’t know what is playing on the screen, but I’d like to think it’s images of stars and nebulae to evoke not just the end of a terrestrial day, but a connection to things that by comparison seem eternal, everlasting.

Communication signals

The dialogue makes me realize another signal is missing for Sol, that is, how does he know when the audio channel to the observation room is open? Now, it would be nice if the audio channel were tied to the state of the viewing portal. That is, audio is connected when the portal is open and they can see each other; and off when the portal is closed. But, we know that Soylent wants the usher to have control of the channels to silence either party at will, so in lieu of that, let’s give some signal to Sol near the observation window to let him know when the audio channel is open. It should look akin to the interface on the other side in the observation room, but it would have to be redesigned for a 10-foot rather than 2-foot experience. It would also have to not be distracting to the patient when their attention is on the cinerama, so a dim, backlit visual might be enough for sighted users. Separate and custom-designed rooms should be built for differently abled patients.

After his plea to Thorn, Sol finally passes, marking the end of his experience with the Thanatorium.

All told, Sol’s experience suits his goals fairly well. He wants a sense of dignity, spectacle, importance, connection to his loved one, and otherworldliness that he receives. There are little things to fix throughout, as mentioned in the text.

My biggest criticism is of being physically separated from loved ones, when a held hand might take the edge off of the fear of death and add a nice dose of oxytocin to the result, but Soylent’s interest is more about maximizing control of the end product, so this, full of risk, would not make it into the final design.

Spinners (flying cars)

21 Feb 2020 by Christopher Noessel

So the first Fritzes are now a thing. Before I went off on that awesome tangent, where were we? Oh that’s right. I was reviewing Blade Runner as part of a series on AI in sci-fi. I was just about to get to Spinners. Now vehicles are complicated things as they are, much less when they are navigating proper 3D space. Additionally, the police force is, ostensibly, a public service, which complicates things even further. So this will get lengthy. Still, I think I can get this down to eight or so subtopics.

In the distant future of 2019⸮, flying cars, called “spinners,” are a reality. They’re largely for the wealthy and powerful (including law enforcement). The main protagonist, Deckard, is only ever a passenger in a few over the course of the film. His partner Gaff flies one, though, so we have enough usage to review.

Opening the skies to automobile-like traffic poses challenges, especially when those skies are as full of lightning bolts, ever-present massive flares, distracting building-sized video advertisements, and of course, other spinners.

Piloting controls

To pilot the spinner, Gaff keeps his hands on each handle of a split yoke. Within easy reach of his fingers are a few unlabeled buttons and small lights. Once we see him reach with his right thumb to press one of the buttons, but we don’t see any result, so it’s not clear what these buttons do. It’s nice that they don’t require him to take his hands off the controls. (This might seem like a prescient concept, but WP tells me the first non-horn wheel-mounted controls date back as far back as 1966.)

It is contextualizing to note the mode of agency here. That is, the controls are manual, with no AI offering assistance or acting as an agent. (The AI is in the passenger’s seat, lol fight me.) It appears to be up to Gaff to observe conditions, monitor displays, perform wayfinding, and keep the spinner on track.

Note that we never see what his feet are doing and never see him doing other things with his hands other than putting on a headset before lift-off. There are lots of other controls to the pilot’s left and in the console between seats, but we never see them in use. So, you know, approach with caution. There are a lot of unknowns here.

The Traditional Chinese characters on the window read “No entry,” for citizens outside the spinner, passing by when it is on the ground. (Hat tips for the translation to Mischa Park-Doob and Frank Chung.)

The spinner is more like a VTOL aircraft or helicopter than a spaceship. That is, it is constantly in the presence of planetary gravity and must overcome the constant resistance of air. So the standards I established in the piloting controls post are of only limited use to us here.

So let’s look at how helicopter controls work. The FAA Helicopter Flying Handbook tells us that a pilot has controls for…

The vertical velocity, up or down. (Controlled by the angle of the control stick called the collective. The collective is to the left of the pilot’s hip when they are seated.)
The thrust. (Controlled by the twistgrip on the collective.)
Movement forward, rearward, left, and right. (Controlled with the stick in front of the pilot, called the cyclic.)
Yaw of the vehicle. (Controlled with the pair of antitorque pedals at the pilot’s feet.)

Since we don’t see Gaff when the spinner is moving up and down, let’s presume that the thing he’s gripping is like a Y-shaped cyclic, with lots of little additional controls around the handles. Then, if we presume he has a collective somewhere out of sight to his left and antitorque pedals at his feet, this interface meets modern helicopter standards for control. From the outside, those appear to be well mapped (collective up = helicopter up, cyclic right = helicopter right). Twist for thrust is a little weird, but it’s a standard and certainly learnable, as I recall from my motorcycling days. So let’s say it’s complete and convincing. Is it the best it could be? I’m not enough of an aeronautical engineer (read: not at all) to imagine better options, so let’s move along. I might have more to say if it was agentive.

Dashboard

There are two large screens in the dashboard. The one directly in front of Gaff shows a stylized depiction of the 3D surfaces around him as cyan highlights on a navy blue background. Approaching red shapes describe a pill-shaped tunnel-in-the-sky display. These have been tested since 1981 and found to provide higher tracking performance to ideal paths in manual flight, lower cognitive workload, and enhanced situational awareness. (https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.56119) So, this is believable and well done. I’m not sure that Gaff could readily use the 3D background to effectively understand the 3D terrain, but it is tertiary, after the real world and the tunnel display.

I have to say that it’s a frustrating anti-trope to run into again, but it must be said: If the spinner knows where the ship should be, and general artificial intelligence exists in this diegesis, why exactly are humans doing the piloting? Shouldn’t the spinner fly itself? But back to the interfaces…

Above the tunnel-in-the-sky display is a cyan 7-segment LED scroll display. In the gif above it displays “MAXIMUM SPEED” and later it provides some wayfinding text. I’m not sure how many different types of information it is meant to cycle through, but it sure would be a pain to wait for vital information to appear, and distracting to have to control it to get to the one you wanted.

There is also a vertical screen in the middle of the console listing cyan labels ALT, VEL, and PTCH. These match to altitude, velocity, and pitch variables, reinforcing the helicopter model. The yellow numbers below these labels change in the scene very slowly, and—remarkably for a four-second interface from 1982—do not appear to change randomly. That’s awesome.

But then, there’s a paragraph of cyan text in the middle of the screen that appears over the course of the scene, letter by letter. This animation calls unnecessary attention to itself. There are also smaller, thin screens in the pilot’s door that also continually scroll that same teeny tiny cyan text. I’m not sure WTF all this text is supposed to be, since it would be horribly distracting to a pilot. There are also a few rows of white LEDs with cylon-eye displays traveling back and forth. They are distracting, but at least they’re regular, and might be habituate-able and act as some sort of ambient display. Anyway, if we were building this thing for real, we’d want to eliminate these.

Lastly, at the bottom of the center screen are some unlabeled bar charts depicting some variables that appear to be wiggling randomly. So, like, only the top fifth of this screen can be lauded. The rest is fuigetry. *sigh* It’s hard to escape.

Wayfinding

To help navigate the 3D space, pilots have a number of tools. First, there are windows where you expect windows to be in a car, and there are also glass panels under their feet. The movie doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but it’s clear in the scene where the spinner lifts off from the street level. These transparent panes surround pilots and passengers and allow them to track visual cues for landmarks and to identify collision threats.

It’s reflecting some neon on the street below.

The tunnel-in-the-sky display above is the most obvious wayfinding tool. Somehow Gaff has entered a destination, and the tunnel guides him where it needs to go. Since this entails a safe path through the air, it’s the most important display. Other bits of information (like the ALT, VEL, and PTCH in the center screen) should be oriented around it. This would make them glanceable, allowing Gaff glance to check them and quickly return his eyes to the windshield. In fact, we have to admit that a heads up display would allow Gaff to keep his attention where it needs to be rather than splitting it between the real world and these dashboard displays. Modern vehicle drivers are used to this split attention, and can manage it well enough. But I suspect that a HUD would be better.

It’s also at this point that you begin to wonder if these are the scout ships we see in *Close Encounters*.

There is also that crawling LED display above the tunnel-in-the-sky screen. In one scene it shows “SECTOR FOUR (4)…QUAD-” (we don’t get to see the end of this phrase) but it implies that one of the bits of information this scroll provides is a reminder of the name of the neighborhood you’re currently in. That really only helps if you’re way off course, and seems too low a fidelity for actual wayfinding assistance, but presuming the tunnel-in-the-sky is helping provide the rest of the wayfinding, this information is of secondary importance.

A special note about takeoff: ENVIRON CTR

The display sequence infamous for appearing in both Alien and Blade Runner happens as Gaff lifts off in a spinner early in the film. White all-cap letters label this blue screen “ENVIRON CTR,” above a grid of square characters. Then two 8-digit sequences “drop” down the center of the square grid: 92886599 | 95654085. Once they drop 3 rows, the background turns red, the grid disappears to be replaced by a big blinking label PURGE. Characters at the bottom read “24556 DR 5”, and don’t change.

After the spinner lifts off the display shows a complex diagram of a circle-within-a-circle, illustrating the increasing elevation from the ground below. The delightful worldbuilding thing about the sequence is that it is inscrutable, and legible only by a trained driver, yet gets full focus on screen. There’s not really enough information about the speculative engineering or functional constraints of the spinner to say why these screens would be necessary or useful. I have a suspicion that a live camera view would be more useful than the circle-within-a-circle view, but gosh, it sure is cool. Here’s the shot from Alien, by the way, for easy comparison.

Since people seem to be all over this one now, let me also interject that Alien is also connected to Firefly, since Mal’s anti-aircraft HUD in the pilot had a Weyland-Yutani logo. Chew on that trivia, Internet.

Intercar communication

Of special note is a scene just before his call to Sebastian’s apartment. Deckard is sitting in his parked vehicle in a call with Bryant. A police spinner glides by and we hear an announcement over his loudspeaker, directed to Deckard’s vehicle saying, “This sector’s closed to ground traffic. What are you doing here?” From inside his vehicle, Deckard looks towards his video phone in the console (we never see if there is video, but he’s looking in that direction rather than out the window) and without touching a thing, responds defensively, “I’m working. What are you doing?” The policeman’s reply comes through the videophone’s speakers, “Arresting you, that’s what I’m doing.”

Note that Deckard did not have to answer the call or even put Bryant on hold. We don’t know what the police officer did on their end, but this interaction implies that the police can make an instant, intrusive audio connection with vehicles it finds suspicious. It’s so seamless it will slip by you if you don’t know to look for it, but it paints quite a picture of intercar communication. Can you imagine if our cars automatically shared an audio space with the cars around it?

External interfaces

Another aspect of the car is that it is an interface not just for the people using the car, but for the citizens observing or near the spinner as it goes about its business. There are a number of features that helps it act as an interface to the public.

Police exist as a social service, and the 995 repeated around the outside helps remind citizens of the number they can call in case of an emergency.

Modern patrol cars have beacons and sirens to tell other drivers to get out of the way when they are on urgent business. Police spinners are gravid with beacons, having 12 of them visible from the front alone. (See below.) As the spinner is taking off, yellow and blue beacons circle as a warning. This would be of no help to a blind person nearby, but the vehicle does make some incidental noise that serves as an audible warning.

The rich light strip makes sense because it has such a greater range of movement than ground-based cars, and needs more attention grabbing power. Another nice touch is that, since the spinner can be above people, there are also beacons on the chassis.

Upshot: Spinners do well

So, all in all, the spinner fares quite well on close inspection. It builds on known models of piloting, shows mostly-relevant data, uses known best practices for assistance, and has a lot of well-considered surface features for citizens.

Now if only I could figure out why they’re called spinners.

Internet 2021

27 Oct 2016 by scifihughf

The opening shot of Johnny Mnemonic is a brightly coloured 3D graphical environment. It looks like an abstract cityscape, with buildings arranged in rectangular grid and various 3D icons or avatars flying around. Text identifies this as the Internet of 2021, now cyberspace.

Strictly speaking this shot is not an interface. It is a visualization from the point of view of a calendar wake up reminder, which flies through cyberspace, then down a cable, to appear on a wall mounted screen in Johnny’s hotel suite. However, we will see later on that this is exactly the same graphical representation used by humans. As the very first scene of the film, it is important in establishing what the Internet looks like in this future world. It’s therefore worth discussing the “look” employed here, even though there isn’t any interaction.

Cyberspace is usually equated with 3D graphics and virtual reality in particular. Yet when you look into what is necessary to implement cyberspace, the graphics really aren’t that important.

MUDs and MOOs: ASCII Cyberspace

People have been building cyberspaces since the 1980s in the form of MUDs and MOOs. At first sight these look like old style games such as Adventure or Zork. To explore a MUD/MOO, you log on remotely using a terminal program. Every command and response is pure text, so typing “go north” might result in “You are in a church.” The difference between MUD/MOOs and Zork is that these are dynamic multiuser virtual worlds, not solitary-player games. Other people share the world with you and move through it, adventuring, building, or just chatting. Everyone has an avatar and every place has an appearance, but expressed in text as if you were reading a book.

guest>>@go #1914 Castle entrance A cold and dark gatehouse, with moss-covered crumbling walls. A passage gives entry to the forbidding depths of Castle Aargh. You hear a strange bubbling sound and an occasional chuckle. Obvious exits: path to Castle Aargh (#1871) enter to Bridge (#1916)

Most impressive of all, these are virtual worlds with built-in editing capabilities. All the “graphics” are plain text, and all the interactions, rules, and behaviours are programmed in a scripting language. The command line interface allows the equivalent of Emacs or VI to run, so the world and everything in it can be modified in real time by the participants. You don’t even have to restart the program. Here a character creates a new location within a MOO, to the “south” of the existing Town Square:

laranzu>>@dig MyNewHome laranzu>> @describe here as “A large and spacious cave full of computers” laranzu>> @dig north to Town Square

The simplicity of the text interfaces leads people to think these are simple systems. They’re not. These cyberspaces have many of the legal complexities found in the real world. Can individuals be excluded from particular places? What can be done about abusive speech? How offensive can your public appearance be? Who is allowed to create new buildings, or modify existing ones? Is attacking an avatar a crime? Many 3D virtual reality system builders never progress that far, stopping when the graphics look good and the program rarely crashes. If you’re interested in cyberspace interface design, a long running textual cyberspace such as LambdaMOO or DragonMUD holds a wealth of experience about how to deal with all these messy human issues.

So why all the graphics?

So it turns out MUDs and MOOs are a rich, sprawling, complex cyberspace in text. Why then, in 1995, did we expect cyberspace to require 3D graphics anyway?

The 1980s saw two dimensional graphical user interfaces become well known with the Macintosh, and by the 1990s they were everywhere. The 1990s also saw high end 3D graphics systems becoming more common, the most prominent being from Silicon Graphics. It was clear that as prices came down personal computers would soon have similar capabilities.

At the time of Johnny Mnemonic, the world wide web had brought the Internet into everyday life. If web browsers with 2D GUIs were superior to the command line interfaces of telnet, FTP, and Gopher, surely a 3D cyberspace would be even better? Predictions of a 3D Internet were common in books such as Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold and magazines such as Wired at the time. VRML, the Virtual Reality Markup/Modeling Language, was created in 1995 with the expectation that it would become the foundation for cyberspace, just as HTML had been the foundation of the world wide web.

Twenty years later, we know this didn’t happen. The solution to the unthinkable complexity of cyberspace was a return to the command line interface in the form of a Google search box.

Abstract or symbolic interfaces such as text command lines may look more intimidating or complicated than graphical systems. But if the graphical interface isn’t powerful enough to meet their needs, users will take the time to learn how the more complicated system works. And we’ll see later on that the cyberspace of Johnny Mnemonic is not purely graphical and does allow symbolic interaction.

Skyways

21 Oct 2015 by Christopher Noessel

When driving in the sky along with other flying cars that fill the skies in 2015, Doc follows a proscribed path in the sky called a skyway. Lanes are distinguished by floating lightposts, which the pilot keeps to his left. It all seems a little chaosy, but so does driving in Mumbai to the outsider, and it works if you know how. The other brilliance of the skyway is that suddenly flying cars make some sense systemically. Before this, I certainly thought of flying cars as personal helicopters, taking you from point to point. But of course that becomes an air traffic control nightmare. Much better to adapt a known system that puts the onus of control to the operators.

Less successful are the road signs. Continue reading →

Iron Man HUD: Just the functions

13 Jul 2015 by Christopher Noessel

In the last post we went over the Iron HUD components. There is a great deal to say about the interactions and interface, but let’s just take a moment to recount everything that the HUD does over the Iron Man movies and The Avengers. Keep in mind that just as there are many iterations of the suit, there can be many iterations of the HUD, but since it’s largely display software controlled by JARVIS, the functions can very easily move between exosuits.

Gauges

Along the bottom of the HUD are some small gauges, which, though they change iconography across the properties, are consistently present.

For the most part they persist as tiny icons and thereby hard to read, but when the suit reboots in a high-altitude freefall, we get to see giant versions of them, and can read that they are:

: Suit status

: Targeting and optics

: Radar

: Artificial horizon

: Map

Continue reading →

Virtual 3D Scanner

3 Jul 2013 by Christopher Noessel

Visualization

The film opens as a camera moves through an abstract, screen-green 3D projection of a cityscape. A police dispatch voice says,

“To all patrolling air units. A 208 is in progress in the C-13 district of Newport City. The airspace over this area will be closed. Repeat:…”

The camera floats to focus on two white triangles, which become two numbers, 267 and 268. The thuck-thuck sounds of a helicopter rotor appear in the background. The camera continues to drop below the numbers, but turns and points back up at them. When the view abruptly shifts to the real world, we see that 267 and 268 represent two police helicopters on patrol.

Color

The roads on the map of the city are a slightly yellower green, and the buildings are a brighter and more saturated green. Having all of the colors on the display be so similar certainly sets a mood for the visualization, but it doesn’t do a lot for its readability. Working with broader color harmonies would help a reader distinguish the elements and scan for particular things.

Perspective

The perspective of the projection is quite exaggerated. This serves partly as a modal cue to let the audience know that it’s not looking at some sort of emerald city, but also hinders readability. The buildings are tall enough to obscure information behind them, and the extreme perspective makes it hard to understand their comparative heights or their relation to the helicopters, which is the erstwhile point of the screen.

There are two ways to access and control this display. The first is direct brain access. The second is by a screen and keyboard.

Brain Access

Kusanagi and other cyborgs can jack in to the network and access this display. The jacks are in the back of their neck and as with most brain interfaces, there is no indication about what they’re doing with their thoughts to control the display. She also uses this jack interface to take control of the intercept van and drive it to the destination indicated on the map.

During this sequence the visual display is slightly different, removing any 3D information so that the route can be unobscured. This makes sense for wayfinding tasks, though 3D might help with a first-person navigation tasks.

Screen and keyboard access

While Kusanagi is piloting an intercept van, she is in contact with a Section 9 control center. Though the 3D visualization might have been disregarded up to this point as a film conceit, here see that it is the actual visualization seen by people in the diegesis. The information workers at Section 9 Control communicate with agents in the field through headsets, type onto specialized keyboards, and watch a screen that displays the visualization.

Their use is again a different mode of the visualization. The information workers are using it to locate the garbage truck. The first screens they see show a large globe with a white graticule and an overlay reading “Global Positioning System Ver 3.27sp.” Dots of different sizes are positioned around the globe. Triangles then appear along with an overlay listing latitude, longitude, and altitude. Three other options appear in the lower-right, “Hunting, Navigation, and Auto.” The “Hunting” option is highlighted with a translucent kelley green rectangle.

After a few seconds the system switches to focus on the large yellow triangle as it moves along screen-green roads. Important features of the road, like “Gate 13” are labeled in a white, rare serif font, floating above the road, in 3D but mostly facing the user, casting a shadow on the road below. The projected path of the truck is drawn in a pea green. A kelley green rectangle bears the legend “Game 121 mile/h / Hunter->00:05:22 ->Game.” The speed indicator changes over time, and the time indicator counts down. As the intercept van approaches the garbage truck, the screen displays an all-caps label in the lower-left corner reading, somewhat cryptically, “FULL COURSE CAUTION !!!”

The most usable mode

Despite the unfamiliar language and unclear labeling, this “Hunter” mode looks to be the most functional. The color is better, replacing the green background with a black one to create a clearer foreground and background for better focus. No 3D buildings are shown, and the camera angle is similar to a real-time-strategy angle of around 30 degrees from the ground, with a mild perspective that hints at the 3D but doesn’t distort. Otherwise the 3D information of the roads’ relationship to other roads is shown with shape and shadow. No 3D buildings are shown, letting the user keep her focus on the target and the path of intercept.

Fhloston evacuation

23 May 2013 by Christopher Noessel

When Fhloston Paradise’s bomb alarms finally go off (a full 15:06 after Zorg’s bomb actually starts. WTH, Fhloston?) four shipwide systems help evacuate the ship.

First, a klaxon is heard on a public address system across the ship. A recorded female voice calmly announces that…

This is a type A alert. For security reasons the hotel must be evacuated. Please proceed calmly to the lifeboats located in the main hallways.

This voice continues to speak a warning countdown, repeating the remaining time every minute, and then when there’s less than a minute at 15 second intervals, and each of the last 10 seconds.

Second, in the main hallway, small, rows of red beacon lights emerge out of the floor and begin flashing and blinking. They repeatedly flash in order to point the direction of the lifeboats.

Third, in the main hallway large arrows on the floor and “LIFEBOAT” lettering illuminate green to point travelers towards ingress points for individual lifeboats.

Fourth, the lifeboats themselves eject from the ship to get the passengers far from danger.

Awesome

The voice warning is a trope, but a trope for a reason. For visually impaired guests and people whose attention is focused on, you know, escape, the audio will still help them keep tabs on the time they have left.
The racing lights provide a nice directionality (a similar interface would have helped Prometheus).
The arrows and beacons require no language skills to comprehend.

Awful

The voice warning and the “LIFEBOAT” signs do require language to comprehend. They couldn’t have used Running Man?
You know when’s a crappy time to add trip hazards to the floor? When a herd of panicked humans are going to be running over it. Seriously. There is no excuse for this.
The beacons and the arrows should be the same color. Green is the ISO standard for exit, so while we’re moving the beacon lights to the ceiling where they belong, we can swap them out for some #33cc00 beacons.
The green arrows at first seem badly placed as it’s difficult to see when there’s a crowd of people, but then you realize that when the room is empty, people will see and follow them. People in a crowd will just follow whatever direction the horde is currently going, and seeing the arrows is unnecessary. But in a light crowd, people will get a glimpse of the arrow and become stressed out over an occluded, potentially life-saving signal or worse, get trampled to death trying to stop and read it to make sure everyone is going the right way, so ultimately awful. Put that up on the ceiling or high on the walls, too. Because people genuinely panic.