Sci-fi Spacesuits: Identification

15 Aug 2021 by Christopher Noessel

Spacesuits are functional items, built largely identically to each other, adhering to engineering specifications rather than individualized fashion. A resulting problem is that it might be difficult to distinguish between multiple, similarly-sized individuals wearing the same suits. This visual identification problem might be small in routine situations:

(Inside the vehicle:) Which of these suits it mine?
What’s the body language of the person currently speaking on comms?
(With a large team performing a manual hull inspection:) Who is that approaching me? If it’s the Fleet Admiral I may need to stand and salute.

But it could quickly become vital in others:

Who’s body is that floating away into space?
Ensign Smith just announced they have a tachyon bomb in their suit. Which one is Ensign Smith?
Who is this on the security footage cutting the phlebotinum conduit?

There a number of ways sci-fi has solved this problem.

Name tags

Especially in harder sci-fi shows, spacewalkers have a name tag on the suit. The type is often so small that you’d need to be quite close to read it, and weird convention has these tags in all-capital letters even though lower-case is easier to read, especially in low light and especially at a distance. And the tags are placed near the breast of the suit, so the spacewalker would also have to be facing you. So all told, not that useful on actual extravehicular missions.

Faces

Screen sci-fi usually gets around the identification problem by having transparent visors. In B-movies and sci-fi illustrations from the 1950s and 60s, the fishbowl helmet was popular, but of course offering little protection, little light control, and weird audio effects for the wearer. Blockbuster movies were mostly a little smarter about it.

1950s Sci-Fi illustration by Ed Emshwiller
c/o Diane Doniol-Valcroze

Seeing faces allows other spacewalkers/characters (and the audience) to recognize individuals and, to a lesser extent, how their faces synch with their voice and movement. People are generally good at reading the kinesics of faces, so there’s a solid rationale for trying to make transparency work.

Armageddon (1998), The Martian (2015), Prospect (2018)

Face + illumination

As of the 1970s, filmmakers began to add interior lights that illuminate the wearer’s face. This makes lighting them easier, but face illumination is problematic in the real world. If you illuminate the whole face including the eyes, then the spacewalker is partially blinded. If you illuminate the whole face but not the eyes, they get that whole eyeless-skull effect that makes them look super spooky. (Played to effect by director Scott and cinematographer Vanlint in Alien, see below.)

Firefly (2002), Battlestar Galactica (2004), Stargate Universe (2009–2011)

Identification aside: Transparent visors are problematic for other reasons. Permanently-and-perfectly transparent glass risks the spacewalker getting damage from infrared lights or blinded from sudden exposure to nearby suns, or explosions, or engine exhaust ports, etc. etc. This is why NASA helmets have the gold layer on their visors: it lets in visible light and blocks nearly all infrared.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle during the Apollo 11 mission.

*Image Credit: NASA* (cropped)

Only in 2001 does the survey show a visor with a manually-adjustable translucency. You can imagine that this would be more safe if it was automatic. Electronics can respond much faster than people, changing in near-real time to keep sudden environmental illumination within safe human ranges.

You can even imagine smarter visors that selectively dim regions (rather than the whole thing), to just block out, say, the nearby solar flare, or to expose the faces of two spacewalkers talking to each other, but I don’t see this in the survey. It’s mostly just transparency and hope nobody realizes these eyeballs would get fried.

So, though seeing faces helps solve some of the identification problem, transparent enclosures don’t make a lot of sense from a real-world perspective. But it’s immediate and emotionally rewarding for audiences to see the actors’ faces, and with easy cinegenic workarounds, I suspect identification-by-face is here in sci-fi for the long haul, at least until a majority of audiences experience spacewalking for themselves and realize how much of an artistic convention this is.

Color

Other shows have taken the notion of identification further, and distinguished wearers by color. Mission to Mars, Interstellar, and Stowaway did this similar to the way NASA does it, i.e. with colored bands around upper arms and sometimes thighs.

Mission to Mars (2000), Interstellar (2014), Stowaway (2021)

Destination Moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Trek (2009) provided spacesuits in entirely different colors. (Star Trek even equipped the suits with matching parachutes, though for the pedantic, let’s acknowledge these were “just” upper-atmosphere suits.)The full-suit color certainly makes identification easier at a distance, but seems like it would be more expensive and introduce albedo differences between the suits.

Destination Moon (1950), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Trek (2009)

One other note: if the visor is opaque and characters are only relying on the color for identification, it becomes easier for someone to don the suit and “impersonate” its usual wearer to commit spacewalking crimes. Oh. My. Zod. The phlebotinum conduit!

According to the Colour Blind Awareness organisation, blindness (color vision deficiency) affects approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women in the world, so is not without its problems, and might need to be combined with bold patterns to be more broadly accessible.

What we don’t see

Heraldry

Blog from another Mog Project Rho tells us that books have suggested heraldry as space suit identifiers. And while it could be a device placed on the chest like medieval suits of armor, it might be made larger, higher contrast, and wraparound to be distinguishable from farther away.

Directional audio

Indirect, but if the soundscape inside the helmet can be directional (like a personal Surround Sound) then different voices can come from the direction of the speaker, helping uniquely identify them by position. If there are two close together and none others to be concerned about, their directions can be shifted to increase their spatial distinction. When no one is speaking leitmotifs assigned to each other spacewalker, with volumes corresponding to distance, could help maintain field awareness.

HUD Map

Gamers might expect a map in a HUD that showed the environment and icons for people with labeled names.

Search

If the spacewalker can have private audio, shouldn’t she just be able to ask, “Who’s that?” while looking at someone and hear a reply or see a label on a HUD? It would also be very useful if I’ve spacewalker could ask for lights to be illuminated on the exterior of another’s suit. Very useful if that other someone is floating unconscious in space.

Mediated Reality Identification

Lastly I didn’t see any mediated reality assists: augmented or virtual reality. Imagine a context-aware and person-aware heads-up display that labeled the people in sight. Technological identification could also incorporate in-suit biometrics to avoid the spacesuit-as-disguise problem. The helmet camera confirms that the face inside Sargeant McBeef’s suit is actually that dastardly Dr. Antagonist!

We could also imagine that the helmet could be completely enclosed, but be virtually transparent. Retinal projectors would provide the appearance of other spacewalkers—from live cameras in their helmets—as if they had fishbowl helmets. Other information would fit the HUD depending on the context, but such labels would enable identification in a way that is more technology-forward and cinegenic. But, of course, all mediated solutions introduce layers of technology that also introduces more potential points of failure, so not a simple choice for the real-world.

Oh, that’s right, he doesn’t do this professionally.

So, as you can read, there’s no slam-dunk solution that meets both cinegenic and real-world needs. Given that so much of our emotional experience is informed by the faces of actors, I expect to see transparent visors in sci-fi for the foreseeable future. But it’s ripe for innovation.

Sci-fi Spacesuits: Audio Comms

3 Aug 2021 by Christopher Noessel

A special subset of spacesuit interfaces is the communication subsystems. I wrote a whole chapter about Communications in Make It So, but spacesuit comms bear special mention, since they’re usually used in close physical proximity but still must be mediated by technology, the channels for detailed control are clumsy and packed, and these communicators are often being overseen by a mission control center of some sort. You’d think this is rich territory, but spoiler: There’s not a lot of variation to study.

Every single spacesuit in the survey has audio. This is so ubiquitous and accepted that, after 1950, no filmmaker has thought the need to explain it or show an interface for it. So you’d think that we’d see a lot of interactions.

*Destination Moon* (1950): Woody learns from the narrator that without air, he needs to extend his radio antenna in order to communicate in space. (Note: You’re not missing something, this live action film had an animated explanatory sequence starring Woody Woodpecker.)

Spacesuit communications in sci-fi tend to be many-to-many with no apparent means of control. Not even a push-to-mute if you sneezed into your mic. It’s as if the spacewalkers were in a group, merely standing near each other in air, chatting. No push-to-talk or volume control is seen. Communication with Mission Control is automatic. No audio cues are given to indicate distance, direction, or source of the sound, or to select a subset of recipients.

The one seeming exception to the many-to-many communication is seen in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. As Boomer is operating a ship above a ground crew, shining a light down on them for visibility, she has the following conversation with Tyrol.

*Battlestar Galactica* (Season 1, Episode 2, “Water” 2004): Boomer and Tyrol confirm contact with each other.

Tyrol
Raptor 478, this is DC-1, I have you in my sights.
Boomer
Copy that, DC-1. I have you in sight.
Tyrol
Understood.
Boomer
How’s it looking there? Can you tell what happened?
Tyrol
Lieutenant, don’t worry…about my team. I got things under control.
Boomer
Copy that, DC-1. I feel better knowing you’re on it.

Then, when her copilot gives her a look about what she has just said, she says curtly to him, “Watch the light, you’re off target.” In this exchange there is clear evidence that the copilot has heard the first conversation, but it appears that her comment to him is addressed to him and not for the others to hear. Additionally, we do not hear chatter going on between the ground grew during this exchange. Unfortunately, we do not see any of the conversationalists touch a control to give us an idea about how they switch between these modes. So, you know, still nothing.

More recent films, especially in the MCU, has seen all sorts of communication controlled by voice with the magic of General AI…pause for gif…

…but as I mention more and more, once you have a General AI in the picture, we leave the realm of critique-able interactions. Because an AI did it.

In short, sci-fi just doesn’t care about showing audio controls in sci-fi spacesuits, and isn’t likely to start caring anytime soon. As always, if you know of something outside my survey, please mention it.

For reference, in the real world, a NASA astronaut has direct control over the volume of audio that she hears, using potentiometer volume controls. (Curiously the numbers on them are not backwards, unlike the rest of the controls.)

A spacewalker uses the COMM dial switch mode selector at the top of the DCM to select between three different frequencies of wireless communication, each of which broadcasts to each other and the vehicle. When an astronaut is on one of the first two channels, transmission is voice-activated. But a backup, “party line” channel requires push-to-talk, and this is what the push-to-talk control is for.

By default, all audio is broadcast to all other spacewalkers, the vehicle, and Mission Control. To speak privately, without Mission Control hearing, spacewalkers don’t have an engineered option. But if one of the radio frequency bands happens to be suffering a loss of signal to Mission Control, she can use this technological blind spot to talk with some degree of privacy.

Sci-fi Spacesuits: Moving around

20 Jul 2021 by Christopher Noessel

Whatever it is, it ain’t going to construct, observe, or repair itself. In addition to protection and provision, suits must facilitate the reason the wearer has dared to go out into space in the first place.

One of the most basic tasks of extravehicular activity (EVA) is controlling where the wearer is positioned in space. The survey shows several types of mechanisms for this. First, if your EVA never needs you to leave the surface of the spaceship, you can go with mountaineering gear or sticky feet. (Or sticky hands.) We can think of maneuvering through space as similar to piloting a craft, but the outputs and interfaces have to be made wearable, like wearable control panels. We might also expect to see some tunnel in the sky displays to help with navigation. We’d also want to see some AI safeguard features, to return the spacewalker to safety when things go awry. (Narrator: We don’t.)

Mountaineering gear

In Stowaway (2021) astronauts undertake unplanned EVAs with carabiners and gear akin to mountaineers use. This makes some sense, though even this equipment needs to be modified for use by astronauts’ thick gloves.

Stowaway (2021) Drs Kim and Levinson prepare to scale to the propellant tank.

Sticky feet (and hands)

Though it’s not extravehicular, I have to give a shout out to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), where we see a flight attendant manage their position in the microgravity with special shoes that adhere to the floor. It’s a lovely example of a competent Hand Wave. We don’t need to know how it works because it says, right there, “Grip shoes.” Done. Though props to the actress Heather Downham, who had to make up a funny walk to illustrate that it still isn’t like walking on earth.

*2001: A Space Odyssey* (1969)
Pan Am: “Thank god we invented the…you know, whatever shoes.”

With magnetic boots, seen in Destination Moon, the wearer simply walks around and manages the slight awkwardness of having to pull a foot up with extra force, and have it snap back down on its own.

*Destination Moon* (1950): Jim Barnes tests his magnetic boots.

Battlestar Galactica added magnetic handgrips to augment the control provided by magnetized boots. With them, Sergeant Mathias is able to crawl around the outside of an enemy vessel, inspecting it. While crawling, she holds grip bars mounted to circles that contain the magnets. A mechanism for turning the magnet off is not seen, but like these portable electric grabbers, it could be as simple as a thumb button.

*Battlestar Galactica* (2008, Season 4, Episode 5, “The Road Less Traveled”): Sergeant Erin Mathias inspects the damaged cylon raider for tracking devices.

Iron Man also had his Mark 50 suit form stabilizing suction cups before cutting a hole in the hull of the Q-Ship.

In the electromagnetic version of boots, seen in Star Trek: First Contact, the wearer turns the magnets on with a control strapped to their thigh. Once on, the magnetization seems to be sensitive to the wearer’s walk, automatically lessening when the boot is lifted off. This gives the wearer something of a natural gait. The magnetism can be turned off again to be able to make microgravity maneuvers, such as dramatically leaping away from Borg minions.

Star Trek: Discovery also included this technology, but with what appears to be a gestural activation and a cool glowing red dots on the sides and back of the heel. The back of each heel has a stack of red lights that count down to when they turn off, as, I guess, a warning to anyone around them that they’re about to be “air” borne.

*Star Trek: Discovery* (2017–) S01E01, “The Vulcan Hello”
Ensign Burnham takes a step out onto the hull before lifting off toward the mysterious beacon.

Quick “gotcha” aside: neither Destination Moon nor Star Trek: First Contact bothers to explain how characters are meant to be able to kneel while wearing magnetized boots. Yet this very thing happens in both films.

*Destination Moon* (1950): Kneeling on the surface of the spaceship.

*Star Trek: First Contact* (1996): Worf rises from operating the maglock to defend himself.

Controlled Propellant

If your extravehicular task has you leaving the surface of the ship and moving around space, you likely need a controlled propellant. This is seen only a few times in the survey.

In the film Mission to Mars, the manned mobility unit, or MMU, seen in the film is based loosely on NASA’s MMU. A nice thing about the device is that unlike the other controlled propellant interfaces, we can actually see some of the interaction and not just the effect. The interfaces are subtly different in that the Mission to Mars spacewalkers travel forward and backward by angling the handgrips forward and backward rather than with a joystick on an armrest. This seems like a closer mapping, but also seems more prone to error by accidental touching or bumping into something.

*Mission to Mars* (2000): Woody inspects the craft for the leak.

The plus side is an interface that is much more cinegenic, where the audience is more clearly able to see the cause and effect of the spacewalker’s interactions with the device.

*Mission to Mars* (2000): The crew performs a daring EVA.

If you have propellent in a Moh’s 4 or 5 film, you might need to acknowledge that propellant is a limited resource. Over the course of the same (heartbreaking) scene shown above, we see an interface where one spacewalker monitors his fuel, and another where a spacewalker realizes that she has traveled as far as she can with her MMU and still return to safety.

*Mission to Mars* (2000): Woody sees that he’s out of fuel.

*Mission to Mars* (2000): Terry sees that she cannot continue her rescue of Woody.

For those wondering, Michael Burnham’s flight to the mysterious signal in that pilot uses propellant, but is managed and monitored by controllers on Discovery, so it makes sense that we don’t see any maneuvering interfaces for her. We could dive in and review the interfaces the bridge crew uses (and try to map that onto a spacesuit), but we only get snippets of these screens and see no controls.

*Star Trek: Discovery* (2017–) S01E01, “The Vulcan Hello”

Iron Man’s suits employ some Phlebotinum propellant that lasts for ever, can fit inside his tailored suit, and are powerful enough to achieve escape velocity.

All-in-all, though sci-fi seems to understand the need for characters to move around in spacesuits, very little attention is given to the interfaces that enable it. The Mission to Mars MMU is the only one with explicit attention paid to it, and that’s quite derived from NASA models. It’s an opportunity for film makers should the needs of the plot allow, to give this topic some attention.

Okoye’s grip shoes

5 Jan 2021 by Christopher Noessel

Like so much of the tech in Black Panther, this wearable battle gear is quite subtle, but critical to the scene, and much more than it seems at first. When Okoye and Nakia are chasing Klaue through the streets of Busan, South Korea, she realizes she would be better positioned on top of their car than within it.

She holds one of her spears out of the window, stabs it into the roof, and uses it to pull herself out on top of the swerving, speeding car. Once there, she places her feet into position, and the moment the sole of her foot touches the roof, it glows cyan for a moment.

She then holds onto the stuck spear to stabilize herself, rears back with her other spear, and throws it forward through the rear-window and windshield of some minions’ car, where it sticks in the road before them. Their car strikes the spear and get crushed. It’s a kickass moment in a film of kickass moments. But by all means let’s talk about the footwear.

Now, it’s not explicit, the effect the shoe has in the world of the story. But we can guess, given the context, that we are meant to believe the shoes grip the car roof, giving her a firm enough anchor to stay on top of the car and not tumble off when it swerves.

She can’t just be stuck

I have never thrown a javelin or a hyper-technological vibranium spear. But Mike Barber, PhD scholar in Biomechanics at Victoria University and Australian Institute of Sport, wrote this article about the mechanics of javelin throwing, and it seems that achieving throwing force is not just by sheer strength of the rotator cuff. Rather, the thrower builds force across their entire body and whips the momentum around their shoulder joint.

Ilgar Jafarov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Okoye is a world-class warrior, but doesn’t have superpowers, so…while I understand she does not want the car to yank itself from underneath her with a swerve, it seems that being anchored in place, like some Wakandan air tube dancer, will not help her with her mighty spear throwing. She needs to move.

It can’t just be manual

Imagine being on a mechanical bull jerking side to side—being stuck might help you stay upright. But imagine it jerking forward suddenly, and you’d wind up on your butt. If it jerked backwards, you’d be thrown forward, and it might be much worse. All are possibilities in the car chase scenario.

If those jerking motions happened to Okoye faster than she could react and release her shoes, it could be disastrous. So it can’t be a thing she needs to manually control. Which means it needs to some blend of manual, agentive, and assistant. Autonomic, maybe, to borrow the term from physiology?

So…

To really be of help, it has to…

monitor the car’s motion
monitor her center of balance
monitor her intentions
predict the future motions of the cars
handle all the cybernetics math (in the Norbert Wiener sense, not the sci-fi sense)
know when it should just hold her feet in place, and when it should signal for her to take action
know what action she should ideally take, so it knows what to nudge her to do

These are no mean feats, especially in real-time. So, I don’t see any explanation except…

AGI is in the Wakandan arsenal (c.f. Griot helping Ross), so this is credible given the diegesis, but I did not expect to find it in shoes.

An interesting design question is how it might deliver warning signals about predicted motions. Is it tangible, like vibration? Or a mild electrical buzz? Or a writing-to-the-brain urge to move? The movie gives us no clues, but if you’re up for a design challenge, give it a speculative design pass.

Wearable heuristics

As part of my 2014 series about wearable technologies in sci-fi, I identified a set of heuristics we can use to evaluate such things. A quick check against those show that they fare well. The shoes are quite sartorial, and look like shoes so are social as well. As a brain interface, it is supremely easy to access and use. Two of the heuristics raise questions though.

Wearables must be designed so they are difficult to accidentally activate. It would have been very inconvenient for Okoye to find herself stuck to the surface of Wakanda while trying to chase Killmonger later in the film, for example. It would be safer to ensure deliberateness with some mode-confirming physical gesture, but there’s no evidence of it in the movie.
Wearables should have apposite I/O. The soles glow. Okoye doesn’t need that information. I’d say in a combat situation it’s genuinely bad design to require her to look down to confirm any modes of the shoes. They’re worn. She will immediately feel whether her shoes are fixed in place. While I can’t name exactly how an enemy might use the knowledge about whether she is stuck in place or not, but on general principle, the less information we give to the enemy, the safer you’ll be. So if this was real-world, we would seek to eliminate the glow. That said, we know that undetectable interactions are not cinegenic in the slightest, so for the film this is a nice “throwaway” addition to the cache of amazing Wakandan technology.

Black Georgia Matters and Today is the Day

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

Today is the last day in the Georgia runoff elections. It’s hard to overstate how important this is. If Ossoff and Warnock win, the future of the country has a much better likelihood of taking Black Lives Matter (and lots of other issues) more seriously. Actual progress might be made. Without it, the obstructionist and increasingly-frankly-racist Republican party (and Moscow Mitch) will hold much of the Biden-Harris administration back. If you know of any Georgians, please check with them today to see if they voted in the runoff election. If not—and they’re going to vote Democrat—see what encouragement and help you can give them.

Some ideas…

Pay for a ride there and back remotely.
Buy a meal to be delivered for their family.
Make sure they are protected and well-masked.
Encourage them to check their absentee ballot, if they cast one, here. https://georgia.ballottrax.net/voter/
If their absentee ballot has not been registered, they can go to the polls and tell the workers there that they want to cancel their absentee ballot and vote in person. Help them know their poll at My Voter Page: https://www.mvp.sos.ga.gov/MVP/mvp.do

This vote matters, matters, matters.

The Royal Talon piloting interface

7 Sep 2020 by Christopher Noessel

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.

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.

Panther Suit 2.0

24 Aug 2020 by Christopher Noessel

The suit that the Black Panther wears is critical to success. At the beginning of the movie, this is “just” a skintight bulletproof suit with homages to its namesake. But, after T’Challa is enthroned, Shuri takes him to her lab and outfits him with a new one with some nifty new features. This write-up is about Shuri’s 2.0 Panther Suit.

Authorizing

At the demonstration of the new suit, Shuri first takes a moment to hold up a bracelet of black Kimoyo beads (more on these in a later post) to his neck. With a bubbly computer sound, the glyphs on the beads begin to glow vibranium-purple, projecting two particular symbols on his neck. (The one that looks kind of like a reflective A, and the other that looks like a ligature of a T and a U.)

This is done without explanation, so we have to make some assumptions here, which is always shaky ground for critique.

I think she’s authorizing him to use the suit. At first I thought the interaction was her “pairing” him with the suit, but I can’t imagine that the bead would need to project something onto his skin to read his identity or DNA. So my updated guess is this is a dermal mark that, like the Wakandan tattoos, the suit will check for with a “intra-skin scan,” like the HAN/BAN concepts from the early aughts. This would enable her to authorize many people, which is, perhaps, not as secure.

This interpretation is complicated by Killmonger’s wearing one of the other Black Panther suits when he usurps T’Challa. Shuri had fled with Queen Romonda to the Jibari stronghold, so Shuri couldn’t have authorized him. Maybe some lab tech who stayed behind? If there was some hint of what’s supposed to be happening here we would have more grounds to evaluate this interaction.

There might be some hint if there was an online reference to these particular symbols, but they are not part of the Wakandan typeface, or the Andinkra symbols, or the Nsibidi symbols that are seen elsewhere in the film. (I have emails out to the creator of the above image to see if I can learn more there. Will update if I get a response.)

Activation

When she finishes whatever the bead did, she says, “Now tell it to go on.” T’Challa looks at it intensely, and the suit spreads from the “teeth” in the necklace with an insectoid computer sound, over the course of about 6 seconds.

We see him activate the suit several more times over the course of the movie, but learn nothing new about activation beyond this. How does he mentally tell it to turn it on? I presume it’s the same mental skill he’s built up across his lifetime with kimoyo beads, but it’s not made explicit in the movie.

A fun detail is that while the suit activates in 6 seconds in the lab—far too slow for action in the field considering Shuri’s sardonic critique of the old suit (“People are shooting at me! Wait! Let me put on my helmet!”)—when T’Challa uses it in Korea, it happens in under 3. Shuri must have slowed it down to be more intelligible and impressive in the lab.

Another nifty detail that is seen but not discussed is that the nanites will also shred any clothes being worn at the time of transformation, as seen at the beginning of the chase sequence outside the casino and when Killmonger is threatened by the Dora Milaje.

Hopefully they weren’t royal…oh. Oh well?

Deactivation

T’Challa thinks the helmet off a lot over the course of the movie, even in some circumstances where I am not sure it was wise. We don’t see the mechanism. I expect it’s akin to kimoyo communication, again. He thinks it, and it’s done. (n.b. “It’s mental” is about as satisfying from a designer’s critique as “a wizard did it”, because it’s almost like a free pass, but *sigh* perfectly justifiable given precedent in the movie.)

Kinetic storage & release

At the demonstration in her lab, Shuri tells T’Challa to, “Strike it.” He performs a turning kick to the mannequin’s ribcage and it goes flying. When she fetches it from across the lab, he marvels at the purple light emanating from Nsibidi symbols that fill channels in the suit where his strike made contact. She explains “The nanites have absorbed the kinetic energy. They hold it in place for redistribution.”

He then strikes it again in the same spot, and the nanites release the energy, knocking him back across the lab, like all those nanites had become a million microscopic bigclaw snapping shrimp all acting in explosive concert. Cool as it is, this is my main critique of the suit.

First, the good. As a point of illustration of how cool their mastery of tech is, and how it works, this is pretty sweet. Even the choice of purple is smart because it is a hard color to match in older chemical film processes, and can only happen well in a modern, digital film. So extradiegetically, the color is new and showing off a bit.

Tactically though, I have to note that it broadcasts his threat level to his adversaries. Learning this might take a couple of beatings, but word would get around. Faithful readers will know we’ve looked at aposematic signaling before, but those kinds of markings are permanent. The suit changes as he gets technologically beefier. Wouldn’t people just avoid him when he was more glowy, or throw something heavy at him to force him to expend it, and then attack when he was weaker? More tactical I think to hold those cards close to the chest, and hide the glow.

Now it is quite useful for him to know the level of charge. Maybe some tactile feedback like a warmth or or a vibration at the medial edge of his wrists. Cinegenics win for actual movie-making of course, but designers take note. What looks cool is not always smart design.

Not really a question for me: Can he control how much he releases? If he’s trying to just knock someone out, it would be crappy if he accidentally killed them, or expected to knock out the big bad with a punch, only to find it just tickled him like a joy buzzer. But if he already knows how to mentally activate the suit, I’m sure he has the skill down to mentally clench a bit to control the output. Wizards.

Regarding Shuri’s description, I think she’s dumbing things down for her brother. If the suit actually absorbed the kinetic energy, the suit would not have moved when he kicked it. (Right?) But let’s presume if she were talking to someone with more science background, she would have been more specific to say, “absorbed some of the kinetic energy.”

Explosive release

When the suit has absorbed enough kinetic energy, T’Challa can release it all at once as a concussive blast. He punches the ground to trigger it, but it’s not clear how he signals to the suit that he wants to blast everyone around him back rather than, say, create a crater, but again, I think we can assume it’s another mental command. Wizards.

Claws

To activate the suit’s claws, T’Challa quickly extends curved fingers and holds them there, and they pop out.

This gesture is awesome, and completely fit for purpose. Shaping the fingers like claws make claws. It’s also when fingers are best positioned to withstand the raking motion. The second of hold ensures it’s not accidental activation. Easy to convey, easy to remember, easy to intuit. Kids playing Black Panther on the sidewalk would probably do the same without even seeing the movie.

We have an unanswered question about how those claws retract. Certainly the suit is smart enough to retract automatically so he doesn’t damage himself. Probably more mental commands, but whatever. I wouldn’t change a thing here.

Black Lives Matter

Each post in the Black Panther review is followed by actions that you can take to support black lives. I had something else planned for this post, but just before publication another infuriating incident has happened.

While the GOP rallies to the cause of the racist-in-chief in Charlotte, right thinking people are taking to the streets in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to protest the unjust shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. The video is hard to watch. Watch it. It’s especially tragic, especially infuriating, because Kenosha had gone through “police reform” initiatives in 2014 meant to prevent exactly this sort of thing. It didn’t prevent this sort of thing. As a friend of mine says, it’s almost enough to make you an abolitionist.

Information is still coming in as to what happened, but here’s the narrative we understand right now: It seems that Blake had pulled over his car to stop a fight in progress. When the police arrived, he figured they had control of the situation, and he walked back to his car to leave. That’s when officers shot him in the back multiple times, while his family—who were still waiting for him in the car—watched. He’s out of surgery and stable, but rather than some big-picture to-do tonight, please donate to support his family. They have witnessed unconscionable trauma.

Several fundraisers posted to support Blake’s family have been taken down by GoFundMe for being fake, but “Justice for Jacob Blake” remains active as of Monday evening. Please donate.

Trivium Bracelet

12 Feb 2019 by Christopher Noessel

The control token in Las Luchadras is a bracelet that slaps on and instantly renders its wearer an automaton, subject to the remote control.

Here’s something to note about this speculative technology. Orlak could have sold this, just this, to law enforcement around the world and made himself a very rich and powerful person. But the movie makes clear he is a mad engineer, not a mad businessperson, so we have to move on.

From Orlak’s point of view, getting the bracelet on its victim should be very easy. Fortunately, it does just that. Orlak can slap it on in a flick. But it’s also trivially easy for a bystander to remove, which seems like…a design oversight. It should work more like a handcuff, that requires a key to remove. It can’t look like a handcuff, of course, since Orlak wants it to go unnoticed. But in addition to the security, the handcuff function would enable the device to fit wrists of many sizes. As it is, it appears to be tailor-made to an individual.

As the diagram illustrates, not all wrists are made the same, and it would not help Orlak to have to carry around a sizing set when he hasn’t had time to secretly get the victim’s measurements.

From http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA209600

Lastly, the audience might have benefited from seeing some visual connection between the bracelet and the remote, like a shared material that had an unusual color or glow, but Orlak would not want this connection since it could help someone identify him as the controller.

Zed-Eyes

28 Nov 2017 by Christopher Noessel

In the world of “White Christmas”, everyone has a networked brain implant called Zed-Eyes that enables heads-up overlays onto vision, personalized audio, and modifications to environmental sounds. The control hardware is a thin metal circle around a metal click button, separated by a black rubber ring. People can buy the device with different color rings, as we see alternately see metal, blue, and black versions across the episode.

To control the implant, a person slides a finger (thumb is easiest) around the rim of a tiny touch device. Because it responds to sliding across its surface, let’s say the device must use a sensor similar to the one used in The Entire History of You (2011) or the IBM Trackpoint,

A thumb slide cycles through a carousel menu. Sliding can happen both clockwise and counterclockwise. It even works through gloves.

The button selects or executes the selected action. The complete list of carousel menu options we see in the episode are: Search, Camera, Music, Mail, Call, Magnify, Block, Map. The particular options change across scenes, so it is context-aware or customizable. We will look at some of the particular functions in later posts. For now, let’s discuss the “platform” that is Zed-eyes.

Analysis

There’s not much to discuss about the user interface. The carousel a mature, if constrained, interface model familiar to anyone who has used an iPod. We know the constraints and benefits of such a system, and the Zed-Eyes content seems to fit this kind of interface well.

Hardware

The main question about the hardware is that is must be very very easy to lose or misplace. It would make sense for the Zed-Eyes to help you locate it when you need help, but we don’t see a hint of this in the show.

I think the little watch-battery form factor is a bad design. It’s easy to lose and hard to find and requires a lot of precision to use. Since this exists in a world with very high fidelity image recognition and visual processing, better would be to get rid of input hardware altogether.

Let the user swipe with their thumb across their index finger (or really, any available surface) and have the HUD read that as input. To distinguish real-world interactions that should not have consequence—like swiping dust off a computer—from input meant for the HUD, it could track the user’s visual focal point. When the user’s eyes focus on the empty space in the air right above where they’re swiping, the system knows swiping is meant to affect the interface.

With this kind of interaction there would be no object to lose, and of course save whatever entity provides this service the costs of the hardware and maintenance.

We must note that such a design might not play well cinematically, as viewers might not understand what was happening at first, but understanding the hardware is not critical to understanding the plot-critical effects of using the technology.

Cyborgs in social space

A last question is about the invisibility of the technology. This can cause problems when a user is known to be hearing, but functionally deaf because they are listening to music loudly, and the people around them can’t tell that. Someone could be speaking to the user and believe their non-response is disrespect. It could cause safety problems as, say, a bicyclist barrels towards them on a sidewalk, ringing their bell, expecting the user to move. This can allow privacy abuse as a user can take pictures in circumstances that should be private.

Joe, the moment he is taking a picture of Beth.

One solution would be to make the presence of the tech and interactions quite visible. Glowing pupils and large, obvious gestural control, for example. But in a world where everyone has the technology, the Zed-Eyes can simply limit the behavior of photographs to permitted places, times, and according to the preferences of the people in the photograph. If someone is listening to music and functionally deaf, a real time overlay could inform people around them. This guy is listening to music. If a place is private, the picture option could be disabled with feedback to the user of this. Sorry, pictures are not allowed here.

The visibility we want for ubiquitous technology can be virtual, and provide feedback to everyone involved.

Sling Ring

8 Aug 2017 by scoutlandish

A sling ring opens magical portals of varying sizes between two locations. A sorcerer imagines the destination, concentrates, holds the hand wearing the ring upright and with the other gesticulates in a circle, and the portal opens with a burst of yellow sparks around the edges of the portal.

How might this function as technology

It can’t.

Teleportation, even given cutting-edge concepts of quantum entanglement, is limited to bits of information. All the writing on this topic that I can find online says that physical portals require too much energy. So we have to write the totality of this device off as a narrative conceit.

We can imagine the input working, though, as a reading-from-the-brain interface that matches a sorcerer’s mental image of a location to a physical location in the world. As if you were able to upload an image and have a search engine identify its location. That said, reading-from-the-brain has edge cases to consider.

What if the envisioned place is only imaginary?
What if the sorcerer only has the vaguest memory of it? Or just a name?
What if the picture is clear but the place no longer exists? (Like, say, Sokovia.)

Perhaps of course the portal just never opens, but how does the sorcerer know that’s the cause of the malfunction? Perhaps a glowing 404 would help the more modern sorcerers understand.

@scifiinterfaces has you covered, Steven.

The gestural component

The circular gesture is the mechanism for initiating the portal, an active meditation that likely makes concentrating on the location easier. If we had to compliment one thing, it’s that the gesture is well mapped to the shape of the portal, and having a gesture-concentration requirement ensures that portals aren’t just popping up at whim around Kamar-taj anytime someone wearing a ring remembers a place.

OK. That done, we’re at the end of the compliments. Because otherwise, it’s just dumb.

No, really. Dumb.

The physical design of the Sling Ring is dumb. Like Dumb and Dumber dumb. There are plenty of examples of objects or interfaces in movies that only exist because a writer was lazy, but the SlingRing™ deserves a special award category unto itself.

First off they aren’t rings, they are more like a set of brass knuckles as designed by a 10 year old who’s never seen a brass knuckle.
It restricts the movement of two fingers on the user’s hand which seem to be critical to casting all other spells in the film.
It makes any kind of physical combat with that hand significantly more difficult which, curiously, is something sorcerers seem to do a lot of. Punching someone while wearing a sling ring would likely break a finger or three.
It’s interesting to note that the sentience that makes other relics special may also be their security. However, any sorcerer can apparently pick up any sling ring and use it. Have you ever been bowling? The first 5 minutes of any trip to a bowling alley is trying to find the right sized ball. So unless there’s someone making bespoke sling rings for new magicians, there’s going to be a lot of poorly sized sling rings out there. This might explain why Strange’s ring is loose enough that it can easily fall off or be pulled off, which is inconvenient at best when fighting another sorcerer.

Redesigning this device as a single ring, or a glove or a wristband, or a necklace, or a tiara or a codpiece…frankly just about anything would be better than this tragically flawed artifact and would likely solve all of the above problems.

Hang on, let me remove my not-sling-not-ring first.

And what the heck does sling even mean in this context?

Vaulting Boots of Valtor

25 Jul 2017 by scoutlandish

Mordo wears the Vaulting Boots of Valtor throughout the movie and first demonstrates their use to Dr. Strange when they are sparring. The Boots allow the user to walk, run, or jump on air as if it were solid ground.

When activated, the sole of each boot creates a circular field of force in anticipation of a footfall in midair, as if creating free-floating stepping stones.

How might this work as tech?

The main interaction design challenge is how the wearer indicates where he wants a stepping-stone to appear. The best solution is to let Mordo’s footfall location and motion inform the boots when and where he expects there to be a solid surface. (Anyone who has stumbled while misjudging the height or location of a step on a stairway knows how differently you treat a step where you expect there to be solid footing.)

If this were a technological device, sensors within the boots would retain a detailed history of the wearer’s stride for all possible speeds and distances of movement. The boots would detect muscle tension and flexion combined with the owner’s direction and velocity to accurately predict the placement of each step and then insert an appropriately elevated and angled stepping stone. The boots would know the difference between each of these styles of movement, walking, running, and sprinting and behave accordingly.

As a result, Mordo could always remain upright and stable regardless of his intended direction or how high he had climbed. And while Mordo may be a sorcerer with exceptional physical training, he isn’t superhuman. With the power of the boots he is only able to run and step as high as he could normally if for example he was taking a set of stairs two or three at a time.

As a magical device, the intelligence imbued in the boots is limited to the awareness of the intent of the sorcerer and knows where to place each force-field stepping-stone.

The glowing bits

As each step lands, the placement of the boot results in a brief energy discharge in the shape of a brilliant glowing gold circle. Is this a bug in combat, or a feature? The blog has before called out how glowing bits on a warrior make them an easier target, but it’s worth noting that Mordo’s feet are actually on individual stepping stones for less than a half a second. He leaves them behind as he goes. If someone targeted the circles themselves, they’d mostly be targeting where he was rather than where he is, so I’d count it as a distracting feature. As long as he wasn’t being targeted with a long-distance area-of-effect weapon.

Activation?

When describing them to Strange, Mordo demonstrates the effect with a subtle kick. It’s not clear if he’s activating the boots or just demonstrating that they have inherent magical powers.

These boots are awesome. They would require a lot of practice to get used to, but after some tumbles a user could always acquire the high ground on an opponent and they would never need a ladder to change a light bulb. What’s not known is what would happen if the user tried to do parkour style moves where a step would be perpendicular to the ground. Could Mordo walk on walls or the ceiling of a room?

More!

It would be cool to know more about these boots. Could Mordo climb to a given height and then just stand there or is each step is a limited duration effect? Could the boots be used offensively as a kind of boot sized force field? In a fight, Mordor could lash out with a sidekick/step that stops an onrushing attacker not unlike hitting a brick wall.

Since he’s heavily set up to the Big Bad in the sequel, we’ll likely see more of these relics, and get some more of the questions answered.