Star Trek: Section 31 – Nanokin interfaces

1 Jun 2026 by Christopher Noessel

As part of the Fritzes Best Interfaces award for 2026, I am reviewing the interfaces in Star Trek: Section 31. This post is about the interfaces used by Fuzz.

Close-up of a fictional alien creature with large eyes and a bulbous head, surrounded by a futuristic setting.

Fuzz is a Nanokin, a species of microscopic, squidlike beings with impressive, tiny spaceships. To engage with his teammates in the human-scale world, he does so by flying into a black-market android built to look like a Vulcan, and controlling it from within. In the film they call both the android and the Nanokin “Fuzz”, but that would get confusing in writing, so I’ll call the android the Vulcanbot. I want to believe that the character concept began as a tardigrade or amoeba, but it got more octopus-like over development. From its tiny spaceship, it can get through tiny holes and cracks in machinery or body modifications, hook in, and cause plot-critical mischief.

Blurry close-up of a person with an open mouth, appearing to shout or scream, set against a blurred background.

Close-up view of an open mouth showing white teeth and dark interior.

When the camera is at the nano-scale, the film uses tilt-shift and floating-particle techniques to emphasize the smallness of Fuzz. That means that only a small strip of things are in focus in any given shot, giving us less visual information to work with than usual. So though I’ll cover it, know I’m working with a lot less than I might ordinarily have.

Nanoship

The ship he flies around in is roughly spherical, and about ten times his own diameter. It kind of looks like him, which is both a funny and philosophical design choice. Its surface ripples in waves similar to the surface of the unnamed Section 31 ship that Sahar pilots above the safehouse planet. I think the implication is that it is made from programmable matter.

A futuristic, abstract organism with a textured surface and glowing elements, surrounded by digital interfaces and data displays, set in a dark, sci-fi environment.

A stylized robotic character with blue elements and intricate textures, set against a blurred background of lights and shapes.

It has retractable, tentacle-like appendages coming out from the hull. They can be extended to surfaces to hold the ship in place and interface with electronics. I counted 20 tentacles in one screen shot, but if they’re programmable matter, they can be made ad hoc.

The interaction design question is how these are controlled, but, with programmable matter, general artificial intelligence, and agents all part of the novum stack for the movie, it might be as simple as a prompt: “When you are near safe access points, create connectors to them.” Since it’s never shown in the film, though, we have to leave it as a guess. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine how it might work with a modern technology stack.

A close-up view of a futuristic digital interface displaying various holographic controls and readings, with glowing blue and white elements.

Futuristic digital interface displaying a star map with various celestial objects and navigation symbols.

There is a curved viewport at the front of the ship, subtending around 120° from the pilot’s view. Additional displays to the left and right of the viewport extend the display surface to around 180° degrees. The viewport features an augmented, highly dynamic display, able to show live video, star charts, big red labels, waveforms of audio—whatever is needed in the moment. Language in the display is both English and Nanokinese (for lack of an official known name of that script in the lower left). Stylistically it has a cyan border with white contents, with dusty lavender highlights. Semi-randomly-wandering line segments appear throughout. Sadly, we do not see Fuzz futzing about with this interface at all, so we cannot evaluate that part of it. But it is the context of both the nanomap and nanolever, discussed below.

Nanomap

A curious element in the center of the volumetric projection console is that of an edge-lit, standing human figure with a transverse ring around the waist. It is always there and does not appear to change throughout the film, regardless of the position of the body he’s in or controlling. It might serve simply as a map of the current body-in-question for alert and display purposes. Stuff like wayfinding or a damage control diagram.

Three individuals looking at a futuristic control panel, with glowing screens and intricate designs in a dimly lit setting.

We don’t see it when Fuzz is in Zeph or Dada Noe, but it would be cool if we saw it change to match the current host. Even cooler if we saw some vague indication of the surroundings around the host. Even coolest if we’d seen one virtual body for Vulcanbot and a second one for Zeph on the dashboard when Fuzz had the ability to remote control both.

Nanolever

When Fuzz’ deception is figured out by Georgiou and his Vulcanbot is face-to-face with a phaser, Fuzz grabs a lever and pulls it toward himself. In response Zeph’s corpse—controlled by his mechsuit—begins to rise, again under the control of Fuzz.

The lever is interesting for two reasons.

First, it’s the only physical control visible we see in the ship. (Fuzz has his tentacles raised above the viewport in a number of scenes, but the shot is from the outside of the ship, so we don’t know if he’s operating controls or just bracing himself.) A physical control is persistent and can’t get lost in occluding windows of a digital display. This tells me that Fuzz knew he might get exposed, and might need to pull the lever at any moment to initiate his ace-in-the-hole plan. The physical lever facilitated that much better than a digital one would.

A close-up view of a pair of scissors in a dimly lit environment, surrounded by various tools and illuminated elements.

Second, look at the physical design. It is textured and curved. These are both features which make it easier for octopus arms to grasp and manipulate. (I’m not a cephalopod expert, but this study says so.) We don’t know if Fuzz’ tentacles function similarly to octopus arms, but it’s a reasonable place to start.

I have less confidence in the two rings at the top of it. A shopping search for “lever controls” shows that none of them feature rings or holes. I’m not an industrial designer, but having those rings seems error prone. Not to grip, but to release. If your fingers or tentacles are in those rings, and some emergency situation requires you to quickly grab something else, you might be critically delayed by the fine motor control required to withdraw from the rings. If the lever is just a stick, releasing is practically a non-issue. So I’m less fond of the rings. If you can think of a good reason for these, let me know in the comments.

An Agent!

Since I started thinking in-depth about agentive technology, I’ve been noting when I see them in sci-fi. It’s rare. Up until Fuzz, Dr. Strange’s Cloak of Levitation has been my go-to example. Literacy in agents is becoming more important over time, and popular media is one way that people learn about it. (Especially its risks.) I was delighted to see a plot-centric use of them in this film.

Close-up view of a futuristic cockpit interface displaying 'Conveyance Autopilot Engaged' with illuminated controls and various gauge indicators. — Look close and you’ll see “CONVEYANCE AUTOPILOT ENGAGED” across the screen.

Vulcanbot is an agent while Fuzz is in Zeph, and then Zeph-corpse is an agent as Fuzz is fighting Georgiou to escape. Vulcanbot even handles the b-plot battle with Sahar before being caught in the climactic explosion.

A character wearing a black outfit with pointed ears appears to be pleading or expressing distress in a brightly lit, futuristic setting.

This literacy of what an agent is and what it’s capable of is critical to the protagonists’ fates. If Georgiou hadn’t sussed it out, the team might have split up from unresolved suspicion. Fuzz would have snuck away and San would have returned with the Godsend to the Terran Empire and used it to return and conquer Prime. So her agent-literacy saved the day.

The central role this agent played in the film is one reason I really loved it. Of course even more interesting would have been to see how Fuzz expressed his commands for the agents and monitored their performance against those goals, but because this needed to be hidden for the Big Reveal, we don’t get to.

A missing signal

One important feature that is only weakly implemented in the Vulcanbot and should be stronger when we implement similar technologies in the real world: Agent-mode signals. These signals would convey to observers whether the technology is being operated by a human sentience or when it is being driven by agentive software.

A smiling young man with light blond hair and pointed ears, wearing a red jacket and layered necklaces, standing in front of glowing teal lights.

Of course Fuzz is deeply vested in deception. Vulcanbot acts a little strangely when in agent mode, but it’s because the AI is not rich enough to mimic Fuzz on autopilot. It’s easy to imagine that if it could have been a perfect mimic, Fuzz would rather that.

But for us in the real world we want to know what we’re dealing with. It changes how we interact and what our expectations are. I argued for these deliberate design interventions in the context of Google Duplex way back in 2018, just not on this blog. So let me assert them here. A more ethical Vulcanbot would shift to a modulated voice as a hot signal when it was operating agentively, and interject a cold signal when circumstances called for it.

Delicious woke

Star Trek has addressed queerness before. I’m glad to see it again, considering how the weird MAGA Trump-suckup regime is trying to villainize and scapegoat trans people like the Nazis did with Jewish people here in my home country. And, to be clear, fuck that nonsense.

Though there’s a diegetic “excuse” as to why it is, the perceptual truth is there’s something invisible inside a character that has us accepting a masculine version for most of the movie, and then accepting a feminine version at the end. Same body, different behaviors, sci-fi reason.

A character with pointed ears and a stylish green outfit is speaking in a futuristic setting with various technological elements in the background. — There’s just something inside that informs who this character is and how they behave, even if it doesn’t match your expectations from the outside. Best not to think too much about it.

The rationale is there, so the queer-o-phobes don’t have a good excuse to reject it outright. Diegetically, the invisible part is binarily gendered. Diegetically, that’s what informs the Vulcanbot’s outward behavior, not *gasp* actual genderqueer-ness. It’s fantastically designed for the right kinds of cognitive dissonance.

Perfect for Pride Month. Maybe we can have Nanokin as a teeny tiny marshal for the next sci-fi Pride Parade.

A vibrant street scene during a parade with a large, abstract spherical object in the foreground. The background features crowds of people celebrating with rainbow flags and colorful decorations. — After Dykes on Bikes, of course.

Nice going, team Fuzz, and happy Pride month!

Next up: The quadrant-destroying weapon commissioned by Georgiou

Frito’s F’n Car interface

13 Nov 2018 by Christopher Noessel

When Frito is driving Joe and Rita away from the cops, Joe happens to gesture with his hand above the car window, where a vending machine he happens to be passing spots the tattoo. Within seconds two harsh beeps sound in the car and a voice says, “You are harboring a fugitive named NOT SURE. Please, pull over and wait for the police to incarcerate your passenger.”

Frito’s car begins slowing down, and the dashboard screen shows a picture of Not Sure’s ID card and big red text zooming in a loop reading “PULL OVER”

The car interface has a column of buttons down the left reading:

WTF?

BEER

FART FAN

HOME
GIRLS

At the bottom is a square of icons: car, radiation, person, and the fourth is obscured by something in the foreground. Across the bottom is Frito’s car ID “FRITO’S F’N CAR” which appears to be a label for a system status of “EVERYTHING’S A-OK, BRO”, a button labeled CHECK INGN [sic], another labeled LOUDER, and a big green circle reading GO.

But the car doesn’t wait for him to pull over. With some tiny beeps it slows to a stop by itself. Frito says, “It turned off my battery!” Moments after they flee the car, it is converged upon by a ring of police officers with weapons loaded (including a rocket launcher pointed backward.)

Visual Design

Praise where it’s due: Zooming is the strongest visual attention-getting signals there is (symmetrical expansion is detected on the retina within 80 milliseconds!) and while I can’t find the source from which I learned it, I recall that blinking is somewhere in the top 5. Combining these with an audio signal means it’s hard to miss this critical signal. So that’s good.

But then. Ugh. The fonts. The buttons on the chrome seem to be some free Blade Runner font knock off, the text reading “PULL OVER” is in some headachey clipped-corner freeware font that neither contrasts nor compliments the Blade Jogger font, or whatever it is. I can’t quite hold the system responsible for the font of the IPPA licence, but I just threw up a little into my Flaturin because of that rounded-top R.

Then there’s the bad-90s skeuomorphic, Bevel & Emboss buttons that might be defended for making the interactive parts apparent, except that this same button treatment is given to the label Frito’s F’n Car, which has no obvious reason why it would ever need to be pressed. It’s also used on the CHECK INGN and LOUDER buttons, taking their ADA-insulting contrast ratios and absolutely wrecking any readability.

I try not to second-guess designer’s intentions, but I’m pretty sure this is all deliberate. Part of the illustration of a world without much sense. Certainly no design sense.

In-Car Features

What about those features? NAV is pretty standard function, and having a HOME button is a useful shortcut. On current versions of Google Maps there’s an Explore Places Near You Function, which lists basic interests like Restaurants, Bars, and Events, and has a more menu with a big list of interests and services. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Frito has pressed GIRLS and BEER enough that it’s floated to the top nav.

That leaves only three “novel” buttons to think about: WTF, LOUDER, and FART FAN.

WTF?

If I have to guess, the WTF button is an all-purpose help button. Like a GM OnStar, but less well branded. Frito can press it and get connected to…well, I guess some idiot to see if they can help him with something. Not bad to have, though this probably should be higher in the visual hierarchy.

LOUDER

This bit of interface comedy is hilarious because, well, there’s no volume down affordance on the interface. Think of the “If it’s too loud, you’re too old” kind of idiocy. Of course, it could be that the media is on zero volume, and so it couldn’t be turned down any more, so the LOUDER button filled up the whole space, but…

The smarter convention is to leave the button in place and signal a disabled state, and
Given everything else about the interface, that’s giving the diegetic designer a WHOLE lot of credit. (And our real-world designer a pat on the back for subtle hilarity.)

FART FAN

This button is a little potty humor, and probably got a few snickers from anyone who caught it because amygdala, but I’m going to boldly say this is the most novel, least dumb thing about Frito’s F’n Car interface.

Pictured: A sulfuric gas nebula. Love you, NASA!

People fart. It stinks. Unless you have active charcoal filters under the fabric, you can be in for an unpleasant scramble to reclaim breathable air. The good news is that getting the airflow right to clear the car of the smell has, yes, been studied, well, if not by science, at least scientifically. The bad news is that it’s not a simple answer.

Your car’s built in extractor won’t be enough, so just cranking the A/C won’t cut it.

Rolling down windows in a moving aerodynamic car may not do the trick due to something called the boundary layer of air that “clings” to the surface of the car.

Rolling down windows in a less-aerodynamic car can be problematic because of the Helmholtz effect (the wub-wub-wub air pressure) and that makes this a risky tactic.
Opening a sunroof (if you have one) might be good, but pulls the stench up right past noses, so not ideal either.

The best strategy—according to that article and conversation amongst my less squeamish friends—is to crank the AC, then open the driver’s window a couple of inches, and then the rear passenger window half way.

But this generic strategy changes with each car, the weather (seriously, temperature matters, and you wouldn’t want to do this in heavy precipitation), and the skankness of the fart. This is all a LOT to manage when one’s eyes are meant to be on the road and you’re in an nauseated panic. Having the cabin air just refresh at the touch of one button is good for road safety.

If it’s so smart, then, why don’t we have Fart Fan panic buttons in our cars today?

I suspect car manufacturers don’t want the brand associations of having a button labeled FART FAN on their dashboards. But, IMHO, this sounds like a naming problem, not some intractable engineering problem. How about something obviously overpolite, like “Fast freshen”? I’m no longer in the travel and transportation business, but if you know someone at one of these companies, do the polite thing and share this with them.

Idiocracy-car — Another way to deal with the problem, in the meantime.

So aside from the interface considerations, there are also some strategic ones to discuss with the remote kill switch, but that deserves it’s own post, next.

Cyberspace: Bulletin Board

27 Mar 2017 by scifihughf

Johnny finds he needs a favor from a friend in cyberspace. We see Johnny type something on his virtual keyboard, then selects from a pull down menu.

A quick break in the action: In this shot we are looking at the real world, not the virtual, and I want to mention how clear and well-defined all the physical actions by actor Keanu Reeves are. I very much doubt that the headset he is wearing actually worked, so he is doing this without being able to see anything.

Will regular users of virtual reality systems be this precise with their gestures? Datagloves have always been expensive and rare, making studies difficult. But several systems offer submillimeter gestural tracking nowadays: version 2 of Microsoft Kinect, Google’s Soli, and Leap Motion are a few, and much cheaper and less fragile than a dataglove. Using any of these for regular desktop application tasks rather than games would be an interesting experiment.

Back in the film, Johnny flies through cyberspace until he finds the bulletin board of his friend. It is an unfriendly glowing shape that Johnny tries to expand or unfold without success.

After some more virtual typing, the bulletin board reveals itself as a cube that spins and expands. It doesn’t fill the entire screen, but does reveal the face of Strike, the owner of the bulletin board. His face is stylized as if by a real time image processing filter of the type built into most static image editors today. Strike tells Johnny to go away.

Johnny doesn’t give up and the conversation continues. The cube now expands to fill the screen, with Johnny looking into the cube and Strike’s face on the back wall.

Johnny raises his hands and makes a threatening gesture, saying that he could crash Strike’s entire system. In cyberspace, his fingertips now have blades.

The face retreats in cyberspace, becoming smaller and further away. I’d like to think that Strike leaned back, and that has been mapped into a cyberspace equivalent move. The real world gesture carries its meaning to cyberspace.

A short while ago the Yakuza leader Shinji ordered the tracker to “initiate the virus.” It is at this point that we see the effect, with the cube carrying the image of Strike melting away under a bright light.

While visual representations of cyber attacks are common in books and now TV and films, real world computer designers complain that no system under attack would waste processing power on rendering special effects. This is true for the defenders, but the attackers might want to show their power with a flashy display. Or perhaps these visual effects are generated by Johnny’s own cyberspace system, the 2021 equivalent of today’s warning message that a web site certificate cannot be verified. It’s certainly more attention-grabbing than a small padlock icon disappearing from one corner of your browser window.

At this point the Yakuza arrive in reality, and Jane takes the headset off and drags Johnny out of the shop.

Cyberspace: Newark Copyshop

20 Mar 2017 by scifihughf

The transition from Beijing to the Newark copyshop is more involved. After he travels around a bit, he realizes he needs to be looking back in Newark. He “rewinds” using a pull gesture and sees the copyshop’s pyramid. First there is a predominantly blue window that unfolds as if it were paper.

And then the copyshop initial window expands. Like the Beijing hotel, this is a floor plan view, but unlike the hotel it stays two dimensional. It appears that cyberspace works like the current world wide web, with individual servers for each location that can choose what appearance to present to visitors.

Johnny again selects data records, but not with a voice command. The first transition is a window that not only expands but spins as it does so, and makes a strange jump at the end from the centre to the upper left.

Once again Johnny uses the two-handed expansion gesture to see the table view of the records.

Johnny searches again, but either because there are so few records or because they’re in English, he doesn’t use voice commands. Instead he just runs his fingers over the cells, which highlight as he does so. Again this would be familiar to a current day spreadsheet user.

The contents of the cell are, once more, not useful. Johnny dismisses the copyshop with a sweeping arm gesture which slides the “window” off the right of the screen.

Aside: At normal viewing speed, it looks like the window disappears and, as would be the case in a 1995 or current day desktop system, reveals the previously-displayed windows underneath. Stepping through frame by frame shows that actually it reveals an identical copy of the sliding content! Graphics programmers have always tried hard to avoid such visual glitches, but sometimes they slip into production code anyway.

At this point in the plot, Johnny hasn’t found the images he so desperately needs. He thinks for a moment, and decides to contact the owner of a local bulletin board. Unknown to him, he has also been located by the Pharmakom tracker. Shinji and the Yakuza are on the way, and Shinji orders “initiate the virus.”

Cyberspace: Beijing Hotel

14 Mar 2017 by scifihughf

After selecting its location from a map, Johnny is now in front of the virtual entrance to the hotel. The virtual Beijing has a new color scheme, mostly orange with some red.

The “entrance” is another tetrahedral shape made from geometric blocks. It is actually another numeric keypad. Johnny taps the blocks to enter a sequence of numbers.

The tetrahedral keypad

Note that there can be more than one digit within a block. I mentioned earlier that it can be difficult to “press” with precision in virtual reality due to the lack of tactile feedback. Looking closely, here the fingers of Johnny’s “hands” cast a shadow on the pyramid, making depth perception easier.

Something is wrong, and Johnny receives an electric shock.

He reacts as if the shock is real, pulling his hands back and cursing.

In the 1980s and 1990s cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer and Hardwired and roleplaying games such as Cyberpunk and ShadowRun suggested that future virtual reality systems would be able to physically attack users, the dreaded “Black ICE”. While the more vigilant Internet copyright enforcers would probably be in favour, it seems unlikely that the liability lawyers at any computer manufacturer would allow a product that could electrocute users to be released, or that users would agree to put something like that on their hands. So this is most likely just Johnny expressing the same frustration as a current day video gamer who loses a life in a first person shooter.

The last necessary step before being granted access is, for some reason, to reshape the pyramid.

Here the pyramid serves as a combination lock or puzzle as well as a keypad. It’s not obvious, but Johnny does make a small 3D rotating gesture on the entire pyramid before pulling and pushing blocks around. You can also see a second layer of structure underneath the moving shapes.

Is this an effective security system? Not really. Two-factor authentication systems rely both on knowingsomething, here a numeric code, and either havingsomething, such as a specific mobile phone or token generator, or beingsomeone, with a specific fingerprint. Reshaping the blocks is just a second thing the would-be user must know, and is just as vulnerable to being guessed as the numeric code. On the other hand, it might be enough to keep out simple-minded attacks that only try the first step.

The floorplan

The “interior” of the hotel site is first displayed as a flat plan view. This builds up incrementally, a transition known among VR developers since the film Tron came out as “rezzing up”. The completed plan then rotates into a 3D structure.

We hear the voice feedback announce “General accounts selected” but don’t see how Johnny did this. A window expands out, and Johnny splits it in half to reveal some tabular data.

The fax and phone records are displayed in a simple tabular view, which would not look out of place on any 1995 or indeed current day desktop computer spreadsheet. There’s no need to use 3D graphics for such this.

There are new interface elements here, overlaying the tabular data in pink. At the top we can read SEARCH > FAX CHARGES: FOUND. And on the right is a set of inscrutable numbers with headings GRID, LEVEL, MENU, and XYZ. This could be some orientation within the data, but it doesn’t make sense. In the lower-left we see a label for elevation, with data as “coordinates in sector 4.”

Below that a 9-key arrangement with arrow shapes. Perhaps this is a navigation aid for people using conventional 2D desktop interfaces rather than full virtual reality equipment, allowing them to move around by clicking the onscreen arrows or pressing the equivalent keys. If the keys are similar to those used in computer games, the up and down arrow keys move forward or backwards and the left and right keys rotate, assuming movement is predominantly in the horizontal plane. The other keys might be for banking or vertical movement.

Johnny searches for the outgoing fax. He does not use any graphical gestures for this, instead specifying the search date and time ranges by speaking. Words and operators are more precise than graphic symbols for this kind of database query, but typing on a virtual keyboard would be more awkward than speech.

When the particular table cell is found, he uses the fingertips of both hands to expand the contents, one of the standard gestures described in the Make It So book.

Not surprisingly for a Beijing hotel, the internal records are not in English. Johnny again uses a voice command to ask for translation.

The hotel record is just the metadata, not the actual images he’s looking for, suggesting that “fax” system is fully digital and the faxes themselves are treated like modern email messages and deleted once sent. The metadata does tell Johnny that the images were faxed to a online copyshop in Newark. Since it is network connected, Johnny can jump straight to it in cyberspace.

Perpvision

11 Jul 2013 by Christopher Noessel

The core of interaction design is the see-think-do loop that describes the outputs, human cognition, and inputs of an interactive system. A film or TV show spends time showing inputs without describing some output, only when these users are in the background and unrelated to the plot. But there are a few examples of outputs with no apparent inputs. These are hard to evaluate in a standard way because it’s such a giant piece of the puzzle. Is it a brain input? Is the technology agentive? Is it some hidden input like Myo‘s muscle sensing? Not knowing the input, a regular review is kind of pointless. All I can do is list its effects and perhaps evaluate the outputs in terms of the apparent goals. Ghost in the Shell has several of these types of inputless systems. Today’s is Kusanagi’s heat vision.

Early in the film, Kusanagi sits atop a skyscraper, jacked in, wearing dark goggles, and eavesdropping on a conversation taking place in a building far below. As she looks down, she sees through the walls of the building in a scanline screen-green view that shows the people as bright green and furniture as a dim green, with everything else being black.

She adjusts the view by steps to zoom closer and closer until her field of vision is filled with the two men conversing in her earpiece. When she hears mention of Project 2501 she thinks the message, “Major, Section 6 is ready to move in.” She reaches up to her right temple and clicks a button, to turn the goggles off before removing them.

That’s nifty. But how did she set the depth of field and the extents (the frustum) of the display so that she only sees these people, and not everyone in the building below this? How does she tell the algorithm that she wants to see furniture and not floor? (Is it thermography? Is the furniture all slightly warm?) What is she doing to increase the zoom? If it’s jacked into her head, why must she activate it several times rather than just focusing on the object with her eyes, or specifying “that person there?” How did she set the audio? Why does the audio not change with each successive zoom? If they’re from separate systems, how did she combine them?

Squint gestures

If I had to speculate what the mechanism should be, I would try to use the natural mechanisms of the eye itself. Let Kusanagi use a slight squint gesture to zoom in, and a slight widening of the eyelids to zoom out. This would let her maintain her gaze, maintain her silence, keep her body still, and keep her hands free.

The scene implies that her tools provide a set amount of zoom for each activation, but for very long distances that seems like it would be a pain. I would have the zoom automatically set itself to make the object on which she is focusing fill her field of vision less some border, and then use squint-gestures to change the zoom to the next logical thing. For instance, if she focused on a person, that person would fill her field of vision. A single widening might zoom out to show the couch on which they are sitting. Another the room. This algorithm wouldn’t be perfect, so you’d need some mechanism for arbitrary zoom. I’d say a squint or wide-eyed gesture held for a third of a second or so would trigger arbitrary zoom for as long as the gesture was maintained, with the zoom increasing logarithmically.

As for the frustum, use the same smart algorithm to watch her gaze, and set the extents to include the whole of the subject and the context in which it sits.

Mission Briefing

20 Dec 2012 by Christopher Noessel

Once the Prometheus crew has been fully revived from their hypersleep, they gather in a large gymnasium to learn the details of their mission from a prerecorded volumetric projection. To initiate the display, David taps the surface of a small tablet-sized handheld device six times, and looks up. A prerecorded VP of Peter Weyland appears and introduces the scientists Shaw and Holloway.

This display does not appear to be interactive. Weyland does mention and gesture toward Shaw and Holloway in the audience, but they could have easily been in assigned seats.

Cue Rubik’s Space Cube

After his introduction, Holloway places an object on the floor that looks like a silver Rubik’s Cube with a depressed black button in the center-top square.

Prometheus-055

He presses a middle-edge button on the top, and the cube glows and sings a note. Then a glowing-yellow “person” icon appears, glowing, at the place he touched, confirming his identity and that it’s ready to go.

He then presses an adjacent corner button. Another glowing-yellow icon appears underneath his thumb, this one a triangle-within-a-triangle, and a small projection grows from the side. Finally, by pressing the black button, all of the squares on top open by hinged lids, and the portable projection begins. A row of 7 (or 8?) “blue-box” style volumetric projections appear, showing their 3D contents with continuous, slight rotations.

Gestural control of the display

After describing the contents of each of the boxes, he taps the air towards either end of the row (there is a sparkle-sound to confirm the gesture) and he brings his middle fingers together like a prayer position. In response, the boxes slide to a center as a stack.

He then twists his hands in opposite directions, keeping the fingerpads of his middle fingers in contact. As he does this, the stack merges.

Prometheus-070

Then a forefinger tap summons an overlay that highlights a star pattern on the first plate. A middle finger swipe to the left moves the plate and its overlay off to the left. The next plate automatically highlights its star pattern, and he swipes it away. Next, with no apparent interaction, the plate dissolves in a top-down disintegration-wind effect, leaving only the VP spheres that illustrate the star pattern. These grow larger.

Halloway taps the topmost of these spheres, and the VP zooms through intersteller space to reveal an indistinct celestial sphere. He then taps the air again (nothing in particular is beneath his finger) and the display zooms to a star. Another tap zooms to a VP of LV-223.

After a beat of about 9 seconds, the presentation ends, and the VP of LV-223 collapses back into its floor cube.

Evaluating the gestures

In Chapter 5 of Make It So we list the seven pidgin gestures that Hollywood has evolved. The gestures seen in the Mission Briefing confirm two of these: Push to Move and Point to Select, but otherwise they seem idiosyncratic, not matching other gestures seen in the survey.

That said, the gestures seem sensible. On tapping the “bookends” of the blue boxes, Holloway’s finger pads come to represent the extents of the selection, so bringing them together is a reasonable gesture to indicate stacking. The twist gesture seems to lock the boxes in place, to break the connection between them and his fingertips. This twist gesture turns his hand like a key in a lock, so has a physical analogue.

It’s confusing that a tap would perform four different actions (highlight star patterns in the blue boxes, zoom to the celestial sphere, zoom to star, zoom to LV-223) but there is no indication that this is a platform for manipulating VPs as much as it is a presentation software. With this in mind he could arbitrarily assign any gesture to simply “advance the slide.”

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

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