Colossus Video Phones

14 Oct 2019 by Christopher Noessel

Throughout Colossus: The Forbin Project, characters talk to one another over video phones. This is a favorite sci-fi interface trope of mine. And though we’ve seen it many times, in the interest of completeness, I’ll review these, too.

The first time we see one in use is early in the film when Forbin calls his team in the Central Programming Office (Forbin calls it the CPO) from the Presidential press briefing (remember those?) where Colossus is being announced to the public. We see an unnamed character in the CPO receiving a telephone call, and calling for quiet amongst the rowdy, hip party of computer scientists. This call is received on a wall-tethered 2500 desk phone.

We cut away to the group reaction, and by the time the camera is back on the video phone, Forbin’s image is peering through the glass. We do not get to see the interactions which switched the mode from telephony to videotelephony.

But we can see two nice touches in the wall-mounted interface.

First, there is a dome camera mounted above the screen. Most sci-fi videophones fall into the Screen-Is-Camera trope, so this is nice to see. It could mounted closer to the screen to avoid gaze misalignment that plagues such systems.

One of the illustrations from the book I’m still quite proud of, for its explanatory power and nerdiness. Chapter 4, Volumetric Projection, Page 83.

Second, there is a 12-key numeric keypad mounted to the wall below the screen. (0–9 as well as an asterisk and octothorp.) This keypad is kind-of nice in that it hints that there is some interface for receiving calls, making calls, and ending an ongoing call. But it bypasses actual interaction design. Better would be well-labeled controls that are optimized for the task, and that don’t rely on the user’s knowledge of directories and commands.

The 2500 phone came out in 1968, introducing consumers to the 12-key pushbutton interface rather than the older rotary dial on the 500 model. The 12-key is the filmmakers’ building on interface paradigms that audiences knew. This shortcutting belongs to the long lineage of sci-fi videophones that goes all the way back to Metropolis (1927) and Buck Rogers (1939).

Also, it’s worth noting that the ergonomics of the keypad are awkward, requiring users to poke at it in an error-prone way, or to seriously hyperextend their wrists. If you’re stuck with a numeric keypad as a wall mounted input, at least extend it out from the wall so it can be angled to a more comfortable 30°

Is it still OK to reference Dreyfuss? He hasn’t been Milkshake Ducked, has he?

There is another display in the CPO, but it lacks a numeric keypad. I presume it is just piping a copy of the feed from the main screen. (See below.)

Looking at the call from Forbin’s perspective, he has a much smaller display. There there is still a bump above the monitor for a camera, another numeric keypad below it, and several 2500 telephones. Multiple monitors on the DC desks show the same feed.

After Dr. Markham asks Dr. Forbin to steal an ashtray, he ends the call by pressing the key in the lower right-hand corner of the keypad.

Levels adjusted to reveal details of the interface.

After Colossus reveals that THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM, Forbin calls back and asks to be switched to the CPO. We see things from Forbin’s perspective, and we see the other fellow actually reach offscreen to where the numeric keypad would be, to do the switching. (See the image, below.) It’s likely that this actor was just staring at a camera, so this bit of consistency is really well done.

When Forbin later ends the call with the CPO, he presses the lower-left hand key. This is inconsistent with the way he ended the call earlier, but it’s entirely possible that each of the non-numeric keys perform the same function. This also a good example why well-labeled, specific controls would be better, like, say, one for “end call.”

Other video calls in the remainder of the movie don’t add any more information than these scenes provide, and introduce a few more questions.

The President calls to discuss Colossus’ demand to talk to Guardian.

Note the duplicate feed in the background in the image above. Other scenes tell us all the monitors in the CPO are also duplicating the feed. I wondered how users might tell the system which is the one to duplicate. In another scene we see that the President’s monitor is special and red, hinting that there might be a “hotseat” monitor, but this is not the monitor from which Dr. Forbin called at the beginning of the film. So, it’s a mystery.

Bemusedly discussing the deadly, deadly FOOM with the President.

The President ends his call with the Russian Chairman, which is a first of sorts for this blog.

In a multi-party conference call, The Chairman and Dr. Kuprin speak with the President and Forbin. No cameras are apparent here. This interface is managed by the workers sitting before it, but the interaction occurs off screen.

In the last video conference of the film, everyone listens to Unity’s demands. This is a multiparty teleconference between at least three locations, and it is not clear how it is determined whose face appears on the screen. Note that the CPO (the first in the set) has different feeds on display simultaneously, which would need some sort of control.

Plug: For more about the issues involved in sci-fi communications technology, see chapter 10 of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction. (Though it’s affordably only available in digital formats as of this post.)

Snitch phone

23 Jan 2018 by Christopher Noessel

If you’re reading these chronologically, let me note here that I had to skip Bea Arthur’s marvelous turn as Ackmena, as she tends the bar and rebuffs the amorous petitions of the lovelorn, hole-in-the-head Krelman, before singing her frustrated patrons out of the bar when a curfew is announced. To find the next interface of note, we have to forward to when…

Han and Chewie arrive, only to find a Stormtrooper menacing Lumpy. Han knocks the blaster out of his hand, and when the Stormtrooper dives to retrieve it, he falls through the bannister of the tree house and to his death.

Why aren’t these in any way affiiiiixxxxxxeeeeeeed?

Han enters the home and wishes everyone a Happy Life Day. Then he bugs out.

But I still have to return for the insane closing number. Hold me.

Then Saun Dann returns to the home just before a general alert comes over the family Imperial Issue Media Console.

This is a General Alert. Calling Officer B4711. Officer B4711. We are unable to reach you on your comlink. Is there a problem. [sic] You are instructed to turn on your comlink immediately.

Dann tells the family he can handle it. He walks to the TV and pulls a card out of his wallet. He inserts it into the console, mashes a few buttons and turns his attention to the screen. After a moment of op-art static, General Alert person appears. He says, “We have two way communication, traitor Saun Dann. Is this a report about the missing trooper?”

Dann (like so many rebels) lies, saying the stormtrooper robbed the house and fled for the hills. GA says, “Very well, we’ll send out a search party.” Sean thanks him and the exchange is over. Sean hits a button, pulls his card out of the console, and returns it to his wallet.

Sadly I must bypass the plot questions about the body of the Stormtrooper that is still lying in the forest floor beneath them that will surely be found, or that GA will eventually not find B4711 in the forest and return demanding answers, or why everyone is acting like welp that’s fixed. For this blog is about interfaces.

Whether the card was meant as identification or payment, the interaction is pretty decent. Saun has no trouble fitting it in the slot, and apparently he has no trouble recalling the number to dial the Empire. The same guy in the message answers the call quickly. After the exchange, it’s quick to wrap up. Pull out card, and call is over. Seriously, that’s as short and simple as we could make it.

What was the card for?

If it was payment, we would expect some charges to appear during and after the fact, so let’s just presume it was an identification card for the Empire to track. Since the Empire is evil, they might hide or not provide feedback that the caller has been identified. So it’s not diegetically surprising to note that there’s none.

For all the interfaces that are utter crap in this show, this one actually passes muster. It tempts me to establish some sort of law—that the more mundane interfaces in a show will always be the more believable ones. I’ll think on that. It would need a name.

If I was to add any improvement, it would be to not burden the citizen’s memory with remembering the general alert or how to act on it. What if you’d just caught the end of it? Rather than burdening memory, the Empire could add a crawl to the feed, that persistently repeats the call to action including contact information. Persuasively, it would be an annoyance that would cause citizens watching TV to really want B4711 to hurry up and turn his damn comlink on, or for someone to rat him out.

There are probably some fascist tactics for incentivizing either the Stormtrooper or a snitch’s compliance, but I’m not a fascist, so let’s not go there.

Instead let’s rejoice that there is but one more interface to review, and we can stop with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Phone System Analysis

27 Feb 2017 by scifihughf

Note to readers: The author and editor of this series of posts would like to be Matrix-style cool, competent, stylishly-dressed world-changers with superhuman abilities. In reality we are much closer to the protagonists of Johnny Mnemonic: always frantically improvising to stay one step ahead of disaster with a mix of clunky technology. (And we don’t even have a cybernetic dolphin helping out.) So, um, yeah. This post is out of order. Sorry. Please pretend you haven’t read Cyberspace: the Hardware yet. OK. On to an analysis of the phone system.

The video phones in Johnny Mnemonic all seem easy to use and reliable, but this is generally true of all phones in film and TV, video or otherwise. The audience want to see the characters communicate, not struggle with technology – unless difficulty or failure is necessary for the plot!

Rather than look at individual devices, I think it is more interesting to consider the video phone system as a whole. In Johnny Mnemonic the user experience of the phone system is more a software service than a hardware device.

In the film, phones range in size from the giant wall-mount screens to Shinji’s tiny handheld device, and from fixed locations to moving vehicles or handheld. Any computing and display device, wired or wireless, can act as a phone. The system has followed the same evolution as the web-based applications such as Facebook and GMail we use today that are available anywhere there is a web browser. The Internet makes ubiquitous software services possible.

The alternative path, which with the benefit of hindsight we can see is what happened with our current day phones, is personal devices. Instead of expecting computing devices running software to be available everywhere, we have one hardware device with our software on it that we carry everywhere instead. (Obviously this is over-simplifying a bit: the mobile phone system does require cell towers and/or base stations!) It’s an interesting choice for designers.

The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Within the film we see Takahashi using a hand tracker, a specialised piece of hardware built into his desk, to control a puppet avatar, a real time photorealistic avatar. Nobody else seems to have such capability, nor does Johnny consider the possibility that the person he is talking to might not be real. This gives Takahashi an advantage over others – but only while he makes all phone calls from his desk.

Why does the phone system still exist?

Current day phones, including the few remaining public phone booths, are all dedicated devices. Even though our mobile phones have become portable computers, the phone capability is still restricted to a manufacturer-installed application. In Johnny Mnemonic the phone system is more like the Ethernet jacks in a hotel room or convention centre, allowing users to connect their own devices. Since every call appears to be digital and is recorded in cyberspace, why have a phone network with numbers instead of, say, email addresses?

While the phone system in Johnny Mnemonic is very flexible in how numbers can be dialed and what can be used as video and audio sources, we only see it used for video phone calls, nothing else. Convergence of the phone system and Internet is often predicted but hasn’t happened because the one advantage that phone networks have is low latency and guaranteed resource allocation. Current day phone calls don’t have the occasional stuttering or delays that occasionally affect Skype sessions. (Your non-Internet phone call may be cut off entirely, but it won’t slow down.) In 2021, the phone system may be entirely digital and with video added, but still carrying traffic on separate, dedicated links to ensure quality.

At the time of writing WebRTC, a collection of standards for Web Real-Time Communication including audio and video, is starting to appear in prototype form in widely available browser software. Perhaps by 2021 the future phone system of Johnny Mnemonic will seem much more realistic.

Video call

27 Dec 2016 by Christopher Noessel

After ditching Chewie, Boba Fett heads to a public video phone to make a quick report to his boss who turns out to be…Darth Vader (this was a time long before the Expanded Universe/Legends, so there was really only one villain to choose from).

To make the call, he approaches an alcove off an alley. The alcove has a screen with an orange bezel, and a small panel below it with a 12-key number panel to the left, a speaker, and a vertical slot. Below that is a set of three phone books. For our young readers, phone books are an ancient technology in which telephone numbers were printed in massive books, and copies kept at every public phone for reference by a caller.

To make the call, Fett removes a card from his belt and inserts it. We see a close up of his face for about a second after this, during which time we cannot see if he is taking any further action, but he appears to be waiting and not moving. We hear a few random noises and see some random patterns until Darth Vader comes into view. Fett reports, “I have made contact with the Rebels, and all is proceeding according as you wish, Darth Vader.” We don’t see the interaction from Vader’s side.

Doorknob-simple workflow

A nice feature is that the workflow could barely be simpler. Once Fett inserts the card, the phone is activated, recipient specified, and payment taken care of. Fett has only to wait for Vader to pick up. To make this work, we have to presume that this is a special card, good only for calling Vader at no charge. It’s a nice interaction. Presuming the call is not, you know, top secret. Which, if it needs saying, it is.

The Force is not with this security

As this blog must routinely point out, the system seems to be missing multifactor authentication. The card counts as one factor, that is, something Fett possesses. There should be at least one more. A card can be stolen, so let’s instead focus on something he is and something he knows. Using just the equipment in the scene, the Empire could monitor all the video phones where it knows Fett to be. With face recognition or, more appropriately given his helmet, voice print, it could recognize him for one factor, and then ask him for a password. Two factors. No card. Even more simple and more secure.

But the security problems go beyond the authentication problems that might have some unfortunate pickpocket face to face with the galaxy’s most impulsive Force-choker. During Fett’s call, back on the Falcon, R2D2 is casually trying to find Chewbacca and Fett on the viewscreen and he happens—literally happens—across the transmission between Fett and Vader, with Vader saying, “Good work, but I want them alive. Now that you’ve got their trust, they may take you to their new base.” Fett replies, “This time we’ll get them all.” Vader ends the call saying, “I see why they call you the best bounty hunter in the galaxy.”

Note that the call is public. R2 doesn’t suspect Imperial malfeasance at this point. He’s just checking public video feeds to see if he can find out where Chewie is.

Note also that there isn’t a lick of encryption.

Note finally that the feed we see isn’t even a just a transmission signal. If it was, we’d see the call from one side or the other, in which we’d see either Fett or Vader. But in the clip we see the video switch between them to focus on the active speaker, so either R2 is doing some sweet just-in-time editing, or the signal is actually formatted especially for some third party to eavesdrop on.

An animated scene featuring R2-D2 and C-3PO in front of a control panel with a glowing screen, displaying a colorful, abstract image.

A classic animated scene featuring two robots, one with a blue and white design and the other in yellow, interacting with a control panel that displays a blurred image of a menacing figure on a screen.

So 👏 why👏 the👏 eff 👏 are top secret Imperial transmissions being made on insecure party lines? Heads up, Star Wars fans. We didn’t really need Rogue One. The Rebellion could have come across the plans to the Death Star just channel-flipping from the comfort some nearby couch.

Carrier Control

11 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The second instantiation of videochat with the World Security Council that we see is when Fury receives their order to bomb the site of the Chitauri portal. (Here’s the first.) He takes this call on the bridge, and rather than a custom hardware setup, this is a series of windows that overlay an ominous-red map of the world in an app called CARRIER CONTROL. These windows represent a built-in chat feature for discussing this very topic. There is some fuigetry on the periphery, but our focus is on these windows and the conversation happening through them.

In this version of the chat, we are assured that it is a SECURE TRANSMISSION by a legend across the top of each, but there is not the same level of assurance as in the videoconference room. If it’s still HOTP, Fury isn’t notified of it. There’s a tiny 01_AZ in the upper right of every screen, but it never changes and is the same for each participant. (An homage to Arizona? Lighter Andrew Zink? Cameraman Arthur Zajac?) Though this is a more desperate situation, you imagine that the need for security is no less dire. Having that same cypher key would be comforting if it is in fact a policy.

Different sizes of windows in the app seem to indicate a hierarchy, since the largest window is the fellow who does most of the talking in both conferences, and it does not change as others speak. Such an automated layout would spare Fury the hassle of having to manage multiple windows, though visually these look more like individual objects he’s meant to manipulate. Poor affordances.

The only control we see is when Fury dismisses them, and to do this he just taps at the middle of the screen. The teleconference window is “push wiped” by a satellite view of New York City. Fine, he feels like punching them. But…

a) How does he actually select something in that interface without a tap?

b) A swipe would have been more meaningful, and in line with the gestural pidgin I identified in the gestural chapter of the book.

And of course, if this was the real world, you’d hope for better affordances for what can be done on this window across the board.

So though mostly effective, narratively, could use some polish.

Shadowy videoconferencing room

10 Jun 2015 by Christopher Noessel

After Loki gets away with the crazy-powerful tesseract and a handful of S.H.I.E.L.D. (seriously that’s a pain to type) agents, Fury has a virtual meeting with members of the World Security Council—which is shadowy in appearance and details. To conduct this furtive conference Fury walks into a room custom-built for such purposes.

A bank of large vertically-mounted monitors forms a semicircle in the small room, each mounted above a workstation with keyboard and multiple screens overlit for maximum eyestrain. It’s quite unclear what the agents who normally work here are currently doing, or what those vertically mounted screens normally display, since they’d be a shoo-in for an OSHA lawsuit, given the amount a user would need to crane. Ergonomics, Nick, look it up.

Each screen dedicates most of its real estate to a waist-up view of the speaker. Overlays near the bottom assure us that DATA [is] SECURE and confirms it with a 16-character alphanumeric CYPHER KEY that is frequently changing and unique to each speaker. This is similar to an HMAC-based One-time Password Algorithm (HOTP) password algorithm, so is well-grounded in reality. It’s convincing.

The screens adhere to the trope that every screen is a camera. Nick looks at their eyes and they look right back. Ordinarily that would be a big problem, but with the translucent displays and the edge lighting of the participants, it could actually work.

There is no indication of controls for these screens, but that’s cool if the room is dedicated to this purpose. Someone else would set the call up for him, and all he has to do is walk in. He should be able to just walk out to end it. And let them know how he feels about them.

Sci-fi interfaces

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