Make It So: Learning From SciFi Interfaces
Nathan Shedroff and Chris: Noessel
Podcast transcripts brought to you by the Opera Developer Network
Nathan:Chris:Hi, so I’m Nathan Shedroff.
Nathan:And I’m Chris: Noessel
Nathan:And we’ve been watching a lot of Science Fiction for the last three years with the hope of creating a book with the lessons that we’ve learned—that Science Fiction interfaces, specifically in film and video, or film and television, can teach us about interaction design. And we’re actually finding a lot of really interesting things. You don’t have to take copious notes if you don’t want to, if you just jot down that URL and it’ll be there at the end of the presentation as well. We just uploaded a new version of all of these notes, and there’s screenshots and all of that kind of stuff. We don’t have tons of time here, so we won’t be covering every clip, we’ll kind of move at a rapid pace, but I think we’ll hit all the highlights of the lessons we thought we’d share with you. It’s just a fraction of what we found over the last three years, but it’s some of the cooler stuff. Let’s go!
Chris:So we’ve chosen to focus on interface design and interaction design, and for that… to that matter, specifically on function and behaviour over style and visual design, so we’ll be making a couple of notes around what interfaces look like, but what we’re really interested in from an interaction design standpoint, from the SciFi interfaces that we’ve been studying is, what are the behaviours like and what are the actual interactions? We’ve chosen just to look at TV and film at this point. We know that there’s a lot of really interesting things in games and in anime and in books, especially, but they’re really hard to evaluate if they’re not consistent from frame to frame or scene to scene, especially with hand-drawn illustrations—things morph around and you can’t really get a good read on what was intended by the author or the visualist or the director, etc. So for the most part, in the work that we’ve been looking at, it’s just television and film but it’s probably some of your favourite clips, and the issue with games, for instance, is that it’s really hard to distinguish between the game interface itself and the interfaces in the game. So we’ve, you know, at least for the first book, we’re just doing film and video and then maybe subsequent books will expand the research.
Chris:So when we talk about influence, of course, it’s sort of a hairy issue at best. How can you say that A influenced B? To get to that conclusion, what we’ve done is we’ve got about six thousand images in a database that have been tagged so that we can trace paradigms as they emerge across Science Fiction and compare those to events that occur in the real world with technology. And the framework that we’re going to show you today is really the result of that analysis. So the first way that design and Science Fiction influence each other is really sort of in an anecdotal way. Of course, design and Science Fiction aren’t monoliths, they don’t occur like the weather, they’re made by people. And so the first ring of influence that we see is that Science Fiction makers see things in the real world, the designed world, and that influences them. In a similar sense, we designers may see some things in Science Fiction that, in turn, influence us. But when we go past the anecdotal and sort of broaden our scope a bit, we find that Science Fiction affects designs in three ways, and we’ll get to each of these in turn. The first is by setting the audience’s expectation, the second is by reinforcing the social context in which these interactions occur, and the the third is by proposing new paradigms—‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…’ And in turn, design affects Science Fiction by making things in the real world and actually establishing the actual paradigms that Science Fiction builds on. So that’s our framework today and we’re going to be taking you through a tour of that, and let’s go ahead and start up there at the very top.
Chris:So what we’re going to do to sort of quickly establish that design, the stuff that we make, sort of helps establish things in the real world, is take you through a few clips on a timeline to show you how the paradigm shifts and the audience have necessarily affected Science Fiction. The very first thing we’re going to take a look at is way back at the beginning of film. We’re going to look at George Menier’s ‘Voyage de la Lune’ in 1902 and the great thing that I noticed in this clip is that there are no interfaces. (clip plays). How do you get into the spaceship? Well you grab the door, you lift it up and then how do you seal it and drop it behind you. And then in the film, you actually push the rocket ship into this giant gun and light the darn thing! We don’t have time for the entire clip, but of course the audience, there aren’t a lot of interfaces in this movie and largely because the audience was operating on an industrial age metaphor. They didn’t have a lot of interfaces in their lives, so it’s no surprise that there weren’t a lot of interfaces in that film.
Chris:If we jump ahead twenty five years, we’re going to take a look at Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ and this was done in 1927, and this is a more serious attempt to take a look at what an interface of the future might look like. And in this clip, we actually see Joe Freiderson from the upper city using his wonderful and complicated video phone to call a worker in the lower city. And pay attention to the mix of technological metaphors that he uses to accomplish this somewhat simple task (clip plays). So he checks his messages via tickertape, he turns a dial to get the thing on and this is really marvellous—he has to tune the channel. Of course, it’s a radio metaphor, and you can see he’s trying to get the right one. Finally he’s got it, and then to call him, he actually picks up the telephone and presses a button and then this marvellous actor runs up, ‘Yes sir, yes sir’, I absolutely adore it! If we compare this clip with something that happened only twelve years later with Buck Rogers, this is another video phone—and in fact the next video phone that we see in Science Fiction cinema—but it’s handled completely differently. Pay attention to how the General actually changes the channel and turns off the video phone in this clip (clip plays). So in that clip, he’s doing the same thing but entirely differently, rather than tuning in a frequency and picking up a telephone, he’s just turning knobs that are discrete.
Chris:So if we compare these two films, what’s the real difference here? Well the difference is that in the intervening time, television became a popular thing and I mean electronic television, not mechanical television, where the audience suddenly had access to ‘Yes, we can actually change the channel and turn things on and off by discrete dials’, and the Science Fiction makers were able to build upon this. So hopefully that quick anecdote sort of establishes this fact that we are asserting, that as designers, we put things out in the world and Science Fiction builds upon them. Unless anyone thinks that that’s sort of a quaint part of a bygone era, a black and white era, let me take you to 1993 and Jurassic Park in colour where in this marvellous clip we’ll find some funny paradigms being pointed out as well (clip plays). That’s my favourite moment! The film makers saw it necessary to show you that she was using a mouse to access this computer and in 1993, that was actually sort of a new paradigm, desktop publishing was just sort of getting rolling so it’s no great surprise.
Chris:So hopefully what this quick tour through time has shown is that yes, we build the paradigms that Science Fiction extends. So now we’re going to zoom down and take a look at individual inspiration as far as how design influences Science Fiction. In 1989—and I wrote this one down—the National Library of Medicine released something called the Visual Human Project. If you’re not familiar with it, they took a frozen cadaver, sliced it very thinly, scanned all these and put them into a giant database that you can access with interfaces and sort of zoom through the human body. And actually I froze it here at a a very particular point where you can sort of see that—I guess it’s the left toe on this cadaver—and I was really impressed by this and apparently, somebody at Fox was as well, because in the movie ‘X2’ in 2003 when a security guard approaches Magneto’s holding cell and he’s scanned to see if there are any weapons, in the lower right hand corner you can actually see that same clip. So as a simple anecdote, movie makers are out there investigating the same world that you and I are in, and they sometimes draw on that for the things that they create.
Nathan:We’re going to go ahead and now switch modes and talk about how Science Fiction influences design, and return to that same theme of individual inspiration. This is one of my favourite anecdotes that we found during the course of this writing the book. In the year 2000, a fellow by the name of Douglas Caldwell was successfully petitioned by his teenage son to go see a movie about mutants. Now Douglas is a pretty sober fellow, and doesn’t really like mutant stories but he wanted to bond with the boy, so he actually went to the film and it was during this particular clip that he saw the solution to a two thousand year old problem that he dealt with in his job (clip plays). So the reason that this clip meant so much to Douglas was that he works for the US Army Topographical Engineers. His job is to anticipate where military maneuvers might take place, find the topographical information for it, make a 3D map and then ship that map to the Generals in the field who can then base their strategic decisions on it. Of course, this is a very error-prone process and one that, if he actually mistook where the military maneuver was going to take place, can sort of have grave consequences. What he saw here was the opportunity to draw any topography at any time, so with this clip in mind he sent out an RFP and within three years he was working with a company called XenoTran to create the Mark III Xeno Vision. This is that box closed, let’s take a look at it open. Right there at the base you can see an array of computer controlled pins and those work exactly like you saw in the clip, but they went it one better. The box is open and you can sort of see a thin sheet of rubber at the very top. They are able to close this, vacuum seal it and project a satellite image down on top. So Doug was actually in direct conversation with XenoTran that X-Men was the influence and inspiration for this device. And here we see a single, like, very slow pan example but they’ve also done examples of sort of what Mars looks like on this table and what the tsunamis and Pacific look like. So it’s a really marvellous piece of technology and it was completely inspired by that scene in X-Men and actually, we haven’t talked to Brian Singer directly, but we talked to somebody who worked with him who said that this whole thing was inspired with these little pin-boards that you can put your face in in shops in the mall, and now we have this.
Nathan:And so that brings us to what is maybe obvious to some of us in our community, but not so obvious to a lot of others, is that one of the first lessons we learned is that Science Fiction actually can be this powerful cultural influence on design of interfaces or just design in general. A couple of other lessons that we could gather from the individual inspiration and from the paradigm setting is that we have to be careful when we choose these metaphors because along with easy understanding by the audience some time come some inconsistencies or contradictions or problems with the paradigm. For instance, the Jurassic Park visual, you know, 2D3D sort of geo-spacial paradigm for managing the computer system is I always love because they’re just so ridiculous, she can see the building she needs to click on but she can’t get there until it renders closer and closer, and so along with a lot of these paradigms and you see it very often in Science Fiction, you get a lot of really sort of silly—often even stupid—moments where they’re sort of just thrown in to make the story tense. And that’s something we have to watch as a design community, that we don’t sort of bring that stuff along when we create these things.
Chris:So let’s talk a little bit about expectation. Chris: just covered an example where there was individual inspiration from an engineer designer that was inspired by something he saw in Science Fiction. On a broader scale within audiences within societies, Science Fiction sets up expectations about what’s possible or what’s probable or even what’s desirable, and we see this all the time, so here we have the very first instance in film of a robot—in this case, it’s a Gork from ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (clip plays). He’s an ominous fellow, as many robots were considered back then, and so this moment in film and then in popular culture started this sort of obsession with robots. The term robot actually came much earlier in 1922, I believe, but this is where it really hit film and this is where it became conscious in our lives. We’re going to skip this clip just for a time because it’s just more robots… there we go, until we get to something like this is Asimo from Honda, I believe, and what we see with Asimo is a continuation of this sort of obsession with robots. The problem with this is that this is all set up in terms of expectations about what our lives should be from Science Fiction films. Apparently the folks at Honda don’t have any better idea what robots are going to do for us in our lives but serve us coffee, and this is a pretty expensive multi-billion dollar coffee server! Why does the robot have to look like a person? And, you know, it’s actually a really amazing engineering trick to be able to design this thing to walk and not to spill coffee, etc. but why does it have to look humanoid and ethico-morphic? Because that’s our expectation of robots. If you look at robots in use today in especially manufacturing, industrial robots look nothing like humans, they are mechanical arms at best and they’re incredibly powerful in our society and they’re incredibly popular and valuable, but this expectation that they need to be human-like in order to be robots comes straight from Science Fiction and it’s a very difficult thing for us to let go of.
Nathan:And whereas the nice segue between these two is the notion that our expectations about function can be informed such as they are with robots—‘Boy, what are they going to do for me? Ooh, how about coffee?’—it can also inform our expectations of form.
Nathan:Right, and I’ll also say here, you know, before lunch we heard multiple references to flying cars. That’s another example of this sort of setting expectations about what the future is going to be like, or what are certain technologies are going to be like in our lives. Here’s another really great example—I’m going to skip this clip and go just to the next one, you can probably tell already (Star Trek clip plays). So what does he do? Give it to IT! Yeah, IT wasn’t a lot of help, apparently they’re on t-mobile as well… so this is 1966, remember that date because the very next frame here, exactly thirty years later in 1996, we get the star tack communicator, essentially and it has exactly the same form factor, almost exactly the same size but we can’t actually draw a direct comparison saying, well the Star Trek communicator was the reason why the star tack phone turned out the way it was because we can’t find the engineers that did it, but in the larger cultural context, this was an expectation of a kind of device in an interaction and interface for a communication device that was firmly established for, let’s face it, a large market which was essentially us. A lot of nerds in fact. So it’s actually become part of our cultural heritage and that’s one of the functions that Science Fiction has that we as designers can sort of pick up. It might be, in fact, a little bit difficult to ignore some of these culturally ingrained understandings or expectations when we create products.
Nathan:So let’s look at another paradigm for how Science Fiction interfaces with or influences design, and that is setting the social context and responding to the social context as well. And in this case, we’re going to talk about anthropomorphism. We saw a little bit of it at the beginning with robots. We’re going to delve into this a little bit more. We see a lot of anthropomorphism in the interface, some of it’s more successful than others, some of it’s downright kooky. We have Clippie up there in the upper left corner… Clippie was 1997 to 2007, ten years we had Clippie in Microsoft products, is that amazing? He died just a couple of years ago, I think there was a huge outpouring of celebration… Clippie wasn’t very popular in terms of users’ desire to continue using him or their ability to get rid of using him. We saw the same thing with Microsoft Bob which is next to it. These are really interesting experiments but they were sort of poorly approached. They came off of really smart genuine research that came out of Stanford, out of Nass & Reeves Lab at Stanford, and the research is still sound. Unfortunately they were implemented sort of poorly or not in a particularly effective way. We’re also going to bring up Ms Dewey, has anyone ever interacted with Ms Dewey? Most of you have probably never even heard of her. This is basically an anthropomorphized search engine and it’s just.. it’s actually kind of very surface, it’s video clips on top of a search engine, but the search engine works the same way. You sort of type in a term and then up comes a page of results, but there’s sort of always Ms Dewey there, and so it was an attempt to sort of understand what anthropomorphism might do in a search engine—would it make people more comfortable? Would it change their searching habits? Unfortunately, it wasn’t very well implemented either and she was really kind of a bitch. You can see her, she sort of walks around and sort of huffs and puffs, and you know, I’m not sure what the designers were thinking but most people don’t need that in their search interface! If she was commenting very specifically on what we were searching on, maybe that might be interesting. You can sort of imagine what a search agent might do in the interface in terms of helping you search, but we didn’t see that here. Instead we’ll take a look at an iconic video, industrial video, from 1987 where again we see this sort of interface agent within the computer interface (clip plays).
Nathan:So here we sort of see a much more successful approach towards bringing in an anthropomorphised agent in this case, or a guide into the interface. He’s interruptible, he’s certainly not as annoying, his personality is reduced to almost nothing in fact, but he is a representation of the sort of humanness within the interface. I say it’s more successful because here, it doesn’t cause diversion in this teacher’s workflow and so that’s probably the lowest level, a mark of success, at least in this video, and later in the video, Phil the agent helps the teacher sort of assemble his lesson plan and granted this is fiction, but that’s what Science Fiction is good at. It really shows us a vision of how anthropomorphism might actually help us at the interface. We’ll move on here. Some of the lessons actually I wanted to note though is that this is really difficult to do, or at least to do well. It’s really easy to slap visualisations and representations of people, or in Science Fiction it might be aliens or animals or all sorts of things—it’s really easy to slap these representations on and probably you’ve worked for clients that sort of want to do similar kinds of things but it’s really difficult to do this well, and there’s that sort of form function issue. The form of it may be really seductive, the function of it will very quickly break down if it’s not done well because it also raises our expectation about what the system itself is capable of. But just, lest you think that it requires some sort of visual picture of a person in order to have this anthropomorphism or anthropomorphistic effect work, we’ll show you a couple of examples where there is no representation, at least physical one or visual one (clip plays)
Nathan:So in Star Trek, we have visual interfaces all over the bridge but one of the major ways that they interact with the computer is through an audio interface, and the audio interface is very clearly portrayed with a very deep sort of humanness in terms of the quality of voice. To contrast that, we could take a quick look at this clip from Star Wars (clip plays). So this is really wonderful because how can you not empathise with, you know, whatever R2D2’s feeling with the sort of sounds and sound effects that he uses there? R2D2 is one of the most enduring characters in all of Star Wars and yet he can’t talk, which is kind of bizarre, right? Because C3PO can talk, right? But one of the reasons why he’s so enduring is because we relate to him in this human way and he’s clearly not human or humanoid, there’s nothing that looks human about him, he doesn’t even look like Asimo, but sound—in this case, sound effects, which is sort of his mode of speech—is enough to carry emotional interaction or emotional interaction or emotional information that creates a relationship between us. So whereas in Star Trek, the computer voice in the Enterprise has a very literal human voice, human sounding voice. R2D2 doesn’t even have that and yet the effect stands, it still works for us. We also see that later in Kit or earlier in Kit in Knight Rider, I won’t annoy you with his voice. And so sound can be the carrying mechanism for anthropomorphism or this kind of relationship, and still it can be very powerful. We see, you know, the evidence of these emotional connections that viewers have with characters like R2D2 is carried completely on sound. But that isn’t even all that you need, or I should say, sound isn’t even, you know, the most powerful way to create this anthropomorphic effect. So behaviour sometimes is enough to carry it. There’s essentially no representation here of anthropomorphism of humanism, but when you use one click at Amazon, the fact that it recognises you by saying ‘Welcome back’, dah dah dah dah, and the fact that you can click once and it takes care of all the details pretty much works like our relationships that we have with sort of the places where we’re regulars, like a bar tender for instance at a bar or a pub that you attend a lot. He might have your favourite drink, your regular drink ready by the time, you know, once you walk in the door, by the time you get to the bar it may be ready for you because he knows what your preferences are. And he may trust you to, you know, you don’t have your credit card on you or you don’t have enough cash, oh he’ll get it the next week. That’s essentially what’s happening in this behaviour, is that Amazon is trusting you because you’ve established a relationship that it knows enough about you and your preferences, you know enough about it to trust what it’s going to give you and in one click, that relationship stands. And that’s essentially an anthropomorphic respect.
Nathan:But let’s talk a little bit more about likenesses because this increases the effect of this anthropomorphism because it works in a very social way. So I told you earlier that it doesn’t have to be human-like, it can be animal-like since it’s Science Fiction, or alien-like. Here’s a screenshot from ‘Until the End of the World’, where this is again a search interface, so this is essentially the same as Ms Dewey but much earlier. And it’s called Bounty Bear and so the characters—unfortunately, this is not on DVD, we can’t get a clip of it—but it’s really wonderful because the guy they hire to track down someone types in some information and up comes the Bounty Bear, he’s ‘I’m searching, I’m searching’ and it’s sort of, it’s not in your face but it’s lending an air of sophistication that’s over and above what you would expect from simple computer code and it’s telegraphing that there’s something more powerful going on here and that’s why it’s animated, or there’s an anthropomorphistic effect. We see the same thing in ‘The Matrix’, not with bears (clip plays). Oh, I should have…. it would have been better if I’d stopped it right on Agent Smith. So Agent Smith is represented as a character, as a human, and by doing so in the movie, I mean it makes sense in the context of The Matrix, but by doing this he is, or the directors are telegraphing much more sophistication, much more power and skill and much more danger by representing it as a person, because everything that comes along with being another person or a character comes along with that representation. We see it again in this clip with the Oracle (clip plays). So the Oracle in the film could’ve just been a computer program which the Oracle really is, Agent Smith is just a couple of lines or probably a lot of lines of code, but they chose to represent both of these characters or both of these programs as characters for a reason. The reason is that by representing them as people, we embody these characters and in this case, computer code, with a lot of expectations on our own but a lot of capabilities that we wouldn’t have normally imbued them with if he had gone into a room and there was a computer terminal and he pulled up a program called The Oracle.
Chris:And so this is a lesson that we can use in our work where, when we want to imply power, sophistication, capabilities that may be are beyond the capabilities of what we’re creating, human representation or anthropomorphism can do all those things but coming with those pluses are a bunch of negatives that if we’re not doing it right, like in the cases of Clippie or Ms Dewey, we can fail miserably. So this is sort of a touchy technique to use in interface design. That anthropomorphistic effect, it works in representations like in robots and in things like, you know, eyeballs on paper clips. It works in sound like in R2D2. It even works without any kind of physical representation but just through a behaviour where it’s been very successful with things like the Amazon One Click, but we have to be careful about how we implement this in order to do it right.
Nathan:So the last thing we’re going to go through is about the proposed paradigm and if the social context really points a finger at the human side of an interaction, this is of course where we’re paying attention as designers to the technological side of things. And really the proposed paradigm sort of influence us in one of four ways. The first way is to remind us of something that we already know. So the example we have here is that constraints ease learning curves. We all know this, hopefully we’re all using it in our work but it’s nice to see it writ large on the big screen or even the little screen. We have a positive example of a constraint here in The Fifth Element from 1997 as the characters try and figure out how to work the ultimate weapon (clip plays). So if that’s a positive example, we also have negative examples to remind us of things that we already know. In this movie short which came right before Ratatouille Pixar’s Lifted, we see an example of what happens if you don’t follow that principle (clip plays). And here’s the marvellous image of what he’s looking at—oh, it’s absolutely fantastic!
Chris:There have been computers that have been designed this way, by the way, go Google ‘Aestedes’ and it’s not so different, there’s labels but…
Chris:So the second way that a proposed paradigm can influence us as designers is to sort of engage in a little one-upmanship, meaning films are doing things with interfaces that we have in the real world, but they’re doing them a little bit better than we currently are. So in this case, we have an example of that related to this idea of inputs should know the effective states of their users. Let’s return quickly to The Fifth Element for an example. In this scene, Zorg the villain has just swallowed a cherry pit and is now choking on it (clip plays). So of course what Zorg wants out of this is not really to have shirts flying all over the office. The interface should recognise that mashing buttons is not a common behaviour and in fact, it should summon security but it doesn’t do that. So this is a negative one-upmanship, sort of wagging a finger at us saying, ‘You know guys, we do better’. A positive example of the way just a very similar interface should work comes from Kubrick’s ‘A Space Odyssey’ in 1968. As we watch this clip in which Dr Floyd talks to his little girl via videophone, pay attention to the little girl’s fingers (clip plays). So right there, right in the middle of the phone call, she starts mashing buttons but what’s nice to see is that the interface recognises, ‘Huh, this is a five year old girl, she’s probably not trying to, you know, call somebody, add somebody to the telephone call, and so it simply ignores her input. Now of course, this may be a bit of film-making oversight but we want to credit Kubrick and say yes, this is what he intended.
Chris:So the third way that proposed paradigms can influence designers is by showing us something in a new technology, a proposed technology that we can actually use in our current work. This example actually comes from Star Wars so when the makers were dealing with volumetric displays which colloquially we call holography, they were having just to make it work. One of the ways they just made it work visually, since there was no real holography to base it on, was in how the representations of the person you’re talking with relate to you in scale. So let’s take a look at this quick clip from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in 1980 as Darth Vader talks to the Emperor through a holographic interface (clip plays). So if we take this little clip and we see this giant floating head, let’s contrast that with the video holography shown at the Jedi Council in ‘Star Wars 3—Revenge of the Sith’ (clip plays). So when we freeze and take a look here, the Jedis are much more egalitarian group and so their holography is presented all at the same scale of one another. And really, that’s what the film makers were trying to express to us—the Empire’s an organisation deeply vested in its own hierarchy and so when Darth Vader talks to The Big Man, he’s a big man. And in the Jedi Council, everyone’s the same, everyone’s equal and so their holograms are the same size. We can use this in our own work if, say, you’re designing any social media space where there needs to be a leader, a team facilitator or, I guess, a supervisor who sort of needs to have a heavier presence. It works there for holography in Star Wars and we can use it in our own work.
Nathan:The last way that proposed paradigms can influence us as designers is to actually give us a warning after the sort of cautionary tale for issues that we’re only going to encounter when we’re actually dealing with new technologies. In this case, we’re going to be taking a look at a couple of clips from ‘Minority Report’ and in case you haven’t seen it—but really, who hasn’t seen it—the lead character, Jon Anderton, is using a gestural interface in order to control a video scrubbing tool to see crimes that will be happening (clip plays). So we’re all familiar with this sort of gestural mode. The problem with this interface comes in a scene which occurs a few minutes later, as Anderton meets the Twink from the Fed, let’s watch this clip (clip plays). So in a gestural interface, if your actions have meaning, how to do you deal with moments where your actions shouldn’t have meaning such as grabbing a cheese sandwich or shaking the hand of a fellow in the room? We’re probably not going to encounter this as designers any time soon, unless you’re actually working with the technology but it certainly gives us lots of lessons by showing us what could go wrong, essentially Science Fiction is just saying, ‘Yeah, good luck with that.’
Nathan:So there’s a whole bunch of lessons, if you bother to go to the notes we’ve outlined in text a little bit more carefully the lessons we can take home with us and start putting in our work. We should recognise again that it was about thirty… in fact it was exactly thirty years from Star Trek to Star Tack, and thirty years is about the period of time that Paul Saffo from the Institute of the Future talks about that it takes technology to sort of be realised and accepted by audiences. So one of the lessons we need to keep in mind is that sometimes it’s very easy for us, like in the ‘Minority Report’ clips, to move much quicker than our audiences are ready for or are capable of, and that’s actually a really good thing in some cases because that gives us time to figure out or work the kinks out of some of the technologies like we saw here with the shaking hand, etc. One of the things that Chris: didn’t mention that is also something you can learn from Science Fiction is sort of the back story, turns out that they constantly had to stop filming and cut filming the scenes because Tom Cruise’s arms would get tired, and this is something we haven’t really addressed yet because we get a lot of talk in the media about how wonderful gestural interfaces are and we often, in the media especially, conflate or confuse something like what happens in Minority Report to what multi-touch stuff is happening, for instance Jeff Han’s original demos. But the thing that hasn’t been worked out yet is what are we going to do about our arms getting tired? Because this isn’t something that’s really natural for us. And that’s something that… one of the big lessons that we’ve learned in Science Fiction that is if it works for the audience in general, it works for, you know, a user. You see that, for instance, in the holography for Star Trek. It sort of worked for the audience, certainly it works so seamlessly that most people don’t even notice it, that’s a lesson that we call pull into our own work as interface designers and developers. But there are examples like Tom Cruise’s arms getting tired where it works for the audience and it won’t work for the user, and those are cases where we really need to get to work and figure them out.
So our last lessons are actually really simple. Science Fiction is really good for your career. You should be watching lots of Science Fiction. This is only the beginning, we’re hoping to have a book out very soon and like Chris: said, this is just a fraction of the work. So go look at the notes, and you’re free to email us for more information and we’re sorry there’s no Doctor Who today. Ok, thank you very much.
