CS Seminar “Instrumented Spaces” SS 2003 A. Butz, C. Endres, W. Wahlster

 

Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies

by Michael Schmitz

Abstract

Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with respect to their domain of real-life applications and also evaluated in regard to results of current research in human computer interaction.

Contents

1.		Introduction
2.		Factors of interaction designs in movies
3.		Movies without concepts
4.		Visionary movies (realistic vs idealistic)
	4.1	"Neuro technology"
	4.2	Identification
	4.3	Speech recognition
		Intelligent assistants / Avatars
	4.4	Displays
	4.5	Other I/O technologies
5.		Satiric movie scenes
6.		Conclusion
7.		References

 

1. Introduction

As one can conclude from the term science-fiction movie, these films have a background of an advanced, fictional technology that is normally set in the future. Most of these movies have in common that they expose their own vision of the future, with new technologies commonly being the most noticeable change in these hypothetical worlds. Besides visions about all kinds of scientific areas, the given context of this work concentrates particularly on computer interfaces.

As a part of the seminar "Intelligent Spaces" approaches of mainstream science fiction motion pictures are extracted and analysed regarding their references in real-life human computer interaction (HCI) designs. Similarities to ongoing researches will be outlined - especially to those, which are presented by other talks of this seminar that have already taken place. To be able to draw comparisons to reality it is often necessary to view the ideas and visions of a movie on a relatively abstract level.
At first some key factors that determine or influence the design of HCI in movies will be discussed. Starting from this viewpoint numerous examples from selected movies will be observed. Due to the limitation of the material that was at hand, we cannot claim to provide a complete overview of all movies, but the available selection should suffice and allow a representative inspection of the movie scene.
We will start with a review of movies that do not show any concepts at all or merely adapt common everyday techniques of that time. The second and main part introduces visionary interaction design, divided into different areas of interaction technologies, followed by a brief view at a couple of satiric movie scenes and the conclusions of this work in the end.

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2. Factors that influence interaction design in movies

Before we observe the selected cut-outs, we will examine in short the key factors that contribute to the resulting interaction techniques. We should keep those in mind for later evaluation in order to have a better understanding of the (esp. historical) context of a movie.
The probably most important aspect is the availability of special effects technologies - including the budget of a production to use those. Some movies that will be shown are made at a time where digital editing was not yet existent, whereas other recent motion pictures (e.g. Star Wars Episode II) don’t even contain a single scene without computerized backgrounds or animations. Moreover the commercial success of the movie industry increased a lot during the past 10 years, such that higher budgets became more and more feasible.
Current trends in IT research and products have of course as well an impact on the movie, since this will probably be the director’s background where his ideas will evolve from. That’s where the directors (or his advisors) creativity comes into place. Given that technical realisations of technologies in movies don’t have to be explained or justified, the director benefits from an almost unlimited degree of freedom - compared to researchers or designers of the ‘real’ world.
We also have to consider the importance of the interaction technique or the device itself for the movie as a whole. The technology could be totally unimportant or play an important role for the plot (so called “plot device”), but most of the times technology is found inbetween and has to support the overall authenticity of the vision of a future world.

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3. Movies without concepts

In this section we will review a couple of movies in chronological order that lack any concepts of HCI or that just adapted common technology of that time without new ideas beyond them.
“Metropolis” being the oldest science-fiction movie is a silent film from 1927 created by Fritz Lang in Germany and became a classic piece, which influences movies and music videos throughout the decades that followed. The written dialogues are shown between the scenes, while a piano that plays during performances in public cinemas is the only thing that you will hear. It tells a story about a magnificent futuristic city, which is maintained by workers enslaved underground.
As at this time the digital age hasn’t begun in no aspect, as well the vision of the future in this movie appears very mechanical.

The selected scene shows a worker that operates a device by adjusting huge levers on a clock-like machine whenever a light flashes up, indicating the direction to which the lever has to show. The conceptual fault here is that the controls of the machine are exactly the opposite of a human-centered design, since user has to work for the device to make it run.
“Raumschiff Orion” from 1966 is a german TV Series that was very popular (audience rating of 41%) and still is now: a re-edited movie-length version will be out on alternative cinemas in Germany by the end of this month. The 7 episodes were produced during 6 weeks, such that it had to be improvised a lot, which also shows in the design of the spaceships controls. You can see faucets installed as levers or even a flat iron, which became one of the most remembered feature of this series.

Another scene shows an engineer programming the on-board computer: He is holding a punch card in one hand and typing on a small keyboard with the other hand.

Punch-cards were still used at that time for computer in- and output, which explains the appearance of it, but using them by reading and typing in what is encoded or “written” on them is even a step back from the original intended usage.
Two scenes from “Battlestar Galactica” are chosen as examples for a science fiction movie that simply adapted common interfaces of that time. You see the starfighter controls that consists of a joystick and the motherships interiors that show tv screens, phones and a keyboard built into the desk.

A more recent example is “Password Swordfish” from 2001, where a professional hacker is hired by a terrorist organisation to do some jobs for them. A programming environment was prepared, which consists of 6 flatscreen monitors of common size put together and probably supposed to be used as an enhanced display.

The actual programming of the virus takes place with a graphical 3D interface.

As the whole movie primarily intends to achieve a fancy and cool look, also the technical area exposes a very superficial attitude without attempts to develop an underlying concept.

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4. Visionary movies

In this section we will discuss movies that had their own ideas and visions of human computer interaction or at least used technologies that were not more than prototypes so far.
It can be observed that there are at least two general ways to approach interactions: Some have a clean, idealised design that looks very smooth and error free whereas others introduce flaws and drawbacks to add realism.
The movie clips of this chapter are categorized according to their area of real-life applications and research:
4.1 “Neuro” Technology:
Technologies that connect to brains are introduced here.
4.2 Identification:
Electronical identification of individuals
4.3 Displays:
Various kinds of displays as an output medium
4.4 Speech:
This includes speech synthesis and recognition and also intelligent assistants / avatars as specialised subgroup.
4.5 other I/O technologies:
All technologies that are more specialised and that were difficult to categorize according to the fields above, for example gesture recognition or tangible user interfaces.

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4.1 Neuro technology

Although this field does not concern the HCI research community and it also doesn’t seem realistic from our point of view now, we wanted to include this part, since we still have interaction between humans and computers in a literal sense.
The first example is taken from “Johnny Mnemonic”, a cyberpunk movie with Keanu Reeves playing an agent whose specialty is delivering sensitive data using his brain as a storage device. The scene shows the transfer of the data over a wire that is connected by plugging it into a socket under his ear.

Strangely enough, he also wears a head-mounted display during this procedure.
In “The Matrix” Keanu Reeves again got a role where his brain is interfaced to connect to a computer. As with all other humans in the envisioned future of that movie a computer controls his consciousness by accessing his brain physically through the backside of his head.

He will get disconnected in the first scene and reconnects in the second one to be able to interact with the computer program, the so called matrix.

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4.2 Identification

Electronic identification is introduced in almost all cases in order to be exploited at a later time in the movie. Identification techniques are furthermore also used to track individuals during their everyday life, in such cases the privacy / security issues are the main aspects that the directors try to bring in into their work.
Five scenes are chosen to represent their technology:

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4.2.1
People in the “Logan’s Run” future live in a perfect, harmonic society, which only purpose is enjoyment. The drawback is that people have to be killed at an age of 30, which happens during a ceremony that everybody attends. To avoid panic or revolts among those who are supposed to die, everybody is told that they will be reborn instantly.

As shown in the clip, every child will get a diamond-like implant into their palm at the day of their birth, which allows to track and identify the person, display their life-stage by its colour.

4.2.2
“Gattaca” uses DNA analysis to identify individuals; a drop of blood is taken by a machine and analyzed directly by the same machine.

The choice of this identification technique most probably originates from the main theme of the movie, which is the genetic determination of human beings. Individuals are defined by their genetic patterns, which can be chosen by the parents to alter one ‘s fate. DNA analysis and identification was invented in 1985 and became a tool in crime fighting. A database is already maintained in some countries [1] and assuming that the costs can be reduced and the procedure of analysis speed up, this vision is not too far-fetched. But it is not necessary to take blood of the object, any part of the body would suffice any might be more convenient, for instance hairs or saliva.

4.2.3
Automated palm-print identification systems are already commercially available from several companies, most often used for crime fighting too. [2] Such a system is shown in “Bourne Identity”, where the main character has to access his safe in a Swiss bank.

You normally have to place your hand on a device that can scan your palm in high resolution, but in this film scene a common (possibly touch) screen was used to obtain the palm-print, giving an immediate visual response to the user. This scenario looks more sophisticated and high-tech with this extra feature, accepting the loss of realism, which is not too obvious at first sight anyway.

4.2.4
“Alien IV” uses a identification technique that is not being researched and probably never will, because it is very doubtful if sufficient physiological data can be extracted from its medium: The breath ID. Apparently the odor of a person’s breath is analyzed to grant or deny access to certain areas of the ship.

This idea seems to be an attempt of the director to find a new and unique element for his movie.

4.2.5
Another very popular biometric identification technology are the retinal and iris scan. Either the blood vessel patterns of the retina or the pattern of flecks on the iris can be used to uniquely identify individuals. The object doesn’t necessarily have to interact with a device, it right now works up to a distance that depends on the used video system, but alignment of the eye is still required. [3] Such systems are now gaining acceptance in many areas, and in our imaginative future as described in “Minority Report” they will be installed on public places like subway stations, which would enable the systems owner to track basically everybody and build a history of his or her activities.

It is not required anymore that people would interact with a device, just passing by would suffice. This vision strongly addresses the privacy issue as mentioned above.

 

4.3 Displays

Displays have the advantage for moviemakers that they are inherently visual, in a sense that they are something you have to look at when you use it and hence the audience watching the movie will see it as well, whenever it is used. It is much easier to use and show new ideas for technologies like displays than for instance a new CPU.
“Total Recall” introduces an ambient display embedded in a wall that can be used as a regular screen (a TV here) when needed or just display a picture of a scenery and emerge with the users environment whenever it is not in use.

The display consists of 3 parts, which at first sight reminds of the DynaWall concept that is part of the i-Land project of the Fraunhofer-IPSI institute as introduced to us by Sohail Iqbal. [4] The DynaWall provides an interaction space for CSCW, so the similarity between this project and the screens in this movie scene are quite superficial and merely of a visual kind.
The next example is taken from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (STTNG), a TV Series that was launched in 1988. You will notice 3 kinds of devices/displays of different size throughout the series:
· The Tricorder, a small and handy device that looks very similar to a PDA, equipped with many sensors and used for outdoor analysis.
· A tablet PC that is used at the machine deck and sick bay: a very thin device, with the shape of a piece of paper
· Wall screens almost everywhere on a ship, used to display data for multiple users
The selected scene shows the usage of a tablet PC together with a wall screen at sick bay. The doctor seems to transfer data from the tablet PC that she is holding to the wall screen using a light pen.

The reality is probably that she is holding a piece of plastic together with a small flashlight.
At exactly the same time, a project about ubiquitous computing was started at Xerox Parc where devices were as well categorized into 3 kinds: The tabs, pads and boards. [5]

Tabs are very small and personal and can provide context information about the user that is wearing it. Pads are supposed to be a mixture of a sheet of paper and a laptop, lying around on tables and used spontaneously by any user. Boards are big screens on tables or at walls that especially support collaborative work. The coincidence that this project and the series started at the same time is quite surprising, but it is not clear if one has inspired the other one or if this is only a coincidence, since this classification of devices is quite intuitive and straightforward.
Another variation is taken from “The Matrix: Reloaded”, from a scene where the ship Nebuchadnezzar docked to Zion, the base of the humans. The operators of the base station’s terminal are surrounded by a transparent display with touch-screen and apparently using it by common drag and drop operations – the scene is unfortunately very short and details are unclear.

But you can see that additional information can be seen behind the actual screen layer. In this case, the approaching ship is visible, such that for instance its distance is extra information within the users peripheral perception, which can be obtained when necessary.
A different method to display 3D data is used in a cut-out of “X-Men”, where a mission briefing is conducted with a “physical” display on a big table.

The technology is not explained, the surface seems to consist of small metallic cubes that are formed to the shape of the displayed objects by raising them to the appropriate level. We have seen an approach to display 3 dimensional images physically in Tim Schwartz’s talk on “Table Top Spatially Augmented Reality” [6], where physical structures are augmented by projections.
Holographic displays are very popular among directors and occur frequently and some of them will be introduced here:
In “Forbidden Planet” from 1956 the so-called “thought analyzer”, a device inherited from the planets former inhabitants, displays a 3 dimensional image.

Personal Computers were certainly not yet commonly known at that time, so not even a single 2D display appears in that movie, simple indicator lights were used for computer output except this device.
Also “The Matrix” got one example for a holographic device, it is attached to the Nebuchadnezzar’s controls and displays monochrome but 3 dimensional images.

“Minority Report” shows a holographic projection that we have already seen in Amir Wasim’s introduction to the “Office of the Future” [7], it is interesting to see that they also included a flaw here with distortions at the edge of the images, particularly when you turn around the object.

Another short scene here shortly shows another holographic projection in a virtual reality chamber that can be rented for pleasure and relaxation.

Very similar is the Holo-Deck from STTNG, that is able to materialize substance, enabling you to interact with it.

This is a typical Star Trek technology with its perfect and idealized realisation, very impressive and visual but with a very simplified view on scientific explanations. The so-called Holo-Cube from the latest Star Trek Series “Star Trek Enterprise” underlines this characteristic: It is a small cube brought by a time traveller from year 3000 that is able to fill your surroundings with a projection. In this case in order to display connections of different time lines.

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4.4 Speech

Speech recognition and synthesis appears very frequently, especially for robots - in recent as well as in old movies. The advantage of speech is its intuitiveness for control commands and to perceive information. Besides that it is very easy to realize this for the director, no special effects are needed, just actors imitating the dialog with the computer. In almost all movies the speech interface is conversational and intuitive, the difficulties especially of speech recognition and evaluation are never considered.
The most popular example is probably the main computer of the USS Enterprise, the spaceship of STTNG. The computer handles all kind of requests and replies to all commands with an acoustic signal, to indicate the receipt of the request. MIT used this sound in their Intelligent Room project, when they designed the speech interface to the environment. Requests must be preceded by "Computer?" to which the computer will reply with that particular sound, such that a user knows that the system is in a state to receive and elaborate spoken commands. We've seen an example application in Ralf Jung's speech about this project.
The STTNG main computer serves in another episode as an indoor navigation system, leading Riker to his colleague Data. The system assists him in a multi-modal fashion with a spoken way description and additional arrows on his way.

Multi-modal navigation systems have been have researched by various institutes, like the PDA-based IRREAL project by DFKI [8], where resource adaptivity was the focus of research.
The first implicit artificial intelligence in a movie was the HAL9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick's classic "2001 - Space Odyssey". A computer that was in charge of a spaceship was sent out for exploration purposes, until some of the crew members noticed its abnormal behaviour. Two of them locked themselves in a small shuttle within the ships bay, such that they are acoustically isolated and able to discuss the situation without HAL9000's knowledge. But they were not aware that the computer still had visual contact, seeing their faces.

It could interpret their lip movements and understand their conversation, with the consequence that he started killing the crew one by one to prevent his shutdown.
The idea of computers and machines being aware of themselves was also picked up by John Carpenter in his low-budget production "Dark Star" and extended such that other parts of the ship also had their own identity. Here interacting with them was more like interacting with human colleagues. The selected scenes show the bomb on board of the ship, which was ordered to detonate after a specific time. Unfortunately a malfunction caused it to be stuck in its bay, but it refused to cancel the previous order to explode. One of the crewmembers tried to involve the bomb into a meta-physical dialogue to convince it not to follow these orders.

The last example of speech technology includes an intelligent assistant that serves as a library guide, taken from the 2002 remake of "Time Machine". The main character travels into the 22nd century and encounters this avatar on his search for more information about time travelling. Personal guides for museums or exhibitions are not new and exist as prototypes and also as commercial solutions. They are mostly PDA based and sometimes support kiosks - stationary machines with more resources from which the user can retrieve information of higher quality. The PEACH project by DFKI, an Italian research institute and the Eyeled company is one example for this work. Here it is also possible for the avatar to migrate from the PDA to a kiosk or the other way round [9]. In "Time Machine” multiple transparent, man-size displays are everywhere in the library, such that the computer character (the intelligent assistant) can follow and assist the user everywhere in the building. The avatar displays different kinds of (2D) information on the screens and also interacts with the environment that is visible through the displays.

So for the user in this case the environment becomes an augmented reality, overlaid by the avatar's reactions like pointing to a book.

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4.5 Other I/O technologies

More specialized I/O technologies will be discussed in this chapter. This includes virtual or augmented reality, gesture recognition or other multi-modal mechanisms that could not been assigned to any of the preceding categories.
A typical VR setup with a head-mounted display and data gloves is used in one scene of "Johnny Mnemonic". The agent played by Keanu Reeves is using it to retrieve information from the internet while he browses through an abstract 3D world, manipulating various objects to access sites.

Most of the interactions are not explained and obviously don't make much sense in this context, but one metaphor looks interesting that is when a new session is started by a gesture that looks like opening a book. Another scene from the same movie has gesture recognition for controlling the mimics of a computer animation. A green grid, which strongly reminds of the calibration image of a beamer, is projected onto the hand, indicating a visual recognition.

As implemented in the movie it wouldn't be possible to determine the hands movements using the alignment to the grid pattern, it wouldn't even make much sense to do so in this context. But for the scene it was necessary to show that the face is not the person itself, but just an animation that is controlled by someone else.
More motion tracking has been found in “Total Recall”, when the female main character practices her tennis serve with a holographic projection explaining and demonstrating the correct movements. She tried to imitate the virtual trainer and visual (projection blinks in red) and spoken feedback confirms matching movements.

This idea wouldn’t be difficult to realize, except that 3 dimensional images without head-mounted displays using air as the medium doesn’t work yet. But the users motions could be tracked efficiently by for instance embedding sensors that provide 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) into both wrist-belts or with a camera.
Our next sample techniques come from the British film version of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy” from 1981. The clip introduces the Babel-fish translator, which is a fish that will translate all languages such that you will be able to understand them, by plugging it into your ear.

Here the device/fish is actually supposed to contain all the technology, but for us it would be conceptually more interesting if the fish would be an object in an intelligent space, triggering a function of the system (a translation service) when it is placed into the ear. This would provide an intuitive usage, but it is another question if it is desirable at all to put anything into your ear when you want to activate it.
The concept of virtually overlaying everyday objects with functions is picked up by “The Matrix” too: When Neo was offered two pills, he could decide to stay in the matrix or leave it.

This means in the context of the matrix as a computer program that the pills represent a choice similar to buttons. The metaphor of swallowing a pill as a trigger does automatically raise the users attention to this choice due to the inhibition threshold of taking pills, which underlines the importance of the decision in this scene. The same idea of augmented everyday objects is further used with landline and mobile phones. Stationary phones can represent exit and entry points to the matrix and are used by picking up the phone receiver or putting it down.

Mobile phones are used for communication between people within the matrix and those outside. This approach has the advantage for the director that he can visualize communication between the two ‘worlds’ clearly and unambiguously for the audience without further explanation.
Our last part of this chapter is dedicated to Spielberg’s “Minority Report”, which is the most important movie for this topic. The production designer Alex McDowell, who was basically responsible for the ‘look’ of the production, started his work with a tour through MIT’s media lab, where he could see various demos about gesture recognition projects or the kitchen of the future, getting an impression on the state of current research in this field. His aim was that the audience will be able recognize the movie's future and relate to it, he wanted it to be a consumer-based society, very market-driven, that took today's technological trends to their logical conclusion. On this tour he had the opportunity to talk with John Underkoffler, a gesture expert who was then hired as a consultant for this film. Also Jaron Lanier, known to be the founder of the term “Virtual Reality” was hired, he was briefly introduced by Atif Altaf on his talk about Tele-Immersion. Together with other consultants a so-called ‘Think Tank’ was formed, where these researchers brainstormed and developed their ideas about the future in 2048. The result of these efforts can be seen in various techniques that occur in the movie and remind of ongoing or past projects from MIT or other institutes.
A typical tangible user interface (TUI) very similar to the Marble Answering Machine by Bishop that is now already 10 years old was used to represent offenders and victims to the system. Their names are engraved into wooden marbles, which then can be placed onto slots to achieve information about them.

The Marble Answering Machine is actually a common answering machine that is enhanced with a TUI that represents incoming messages. [10] Placing them to different slots will play the message or dial the callers number, Christian Schmitz mentioned it in his talk about “Tangible bits”.
The principle of a market-oriented future is primarily demonstrated by the immersive and personalized advertisements that the main character encounters during the movie: In one scene he steps out of the subway and different commercials welcome him by his name and compete for his attention. Identification is done by retinal scan at the subways exit as described before.

Another scene shows him entering a clothes shop and again he is recognized by an intelligent shopping assistant that asked if he is pleased with what he bought before. His shopping behavior was stored and used to make conclusions for further recommendations.

Such kind of personalized shopping guides do exist on several websites (for example amazon.com) that make similar suggestions to buyers when they enter their website according to shopping behaviors of customers that bought the same products. Identification is very easy, since you have to log in to process orders and also cookies can be stored for this task. In real-life identification is sometimes done via customer ID cards that are processed when the client pays, but not (yet) when they enter the shop.
The most apparent human computer interface in this movie is the transparent screen with the gesture interface that is used to browse through the memories or visions of the so-called Pre-Cogs.

The user wears gloves with 3 reflective fingertips to achieve 6 DOF of hand movements, which is used for some carefully designed gesture metaphors to manipulate data and its layout on the screen. Beside the usual drag and drop functions you can distinguish actions like cleaning the screen, which looks like a sweep with both hands emptying your desk. Or the zoom function, activated by holding both hands in front of you with their palm side facing to you, the left hand representing the object such that you can zoom in by approaching it with the other hand. One scene also integrates the flaw that the system does not always recognize if you try to interact with it or doing something else with your hands, it happened when someone else came in and wants to shake hands - this movement accidentally caused an object on the screen to be misplaced.

The transparency of the big screen is not only useful for the high-tech look but it also enables the director to show his actors when they operate the device, such that they actually have the chance to act during these scenes, which are very important parts of the plot.
You can also see in one scene how data about a person is transported from one screen to another by small glass tiles that look very similar to Jun Rekimoto’s DataTiles as seen in Rupali Mukherjee’s talk.

Persons are virtually connected to a data tile on one (small) screen and then it is physically taken to the main screen and connected there to use the data associated with it.
Another example of technology that is being researched is the liquid ink. Seen once with a newspaper that changes the displayed (animated and colored) articles and again when the box of cornflakes plays a multimedia clip on the box itself.

The box is shaken several times, obviously in order to turn the animation off. A comparable product at present is the e-ink device that is meant for e-book applications [11], This paper-like display is able to change its contents, which until now is only able to show black and white images.

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5. Satiric movie scenes

Some movie scenes that we found are not particularly important for this work but still worth to be presented here, because they reflect on interaction techniques in a satiric and very entertaining way. The first one is taken from “Start Trek IV” when Spock and Scotty are on earth and supposed to use a 20th century personal computer. Scotty tried to talk to it as he is used to do on the Enterprise and of course failed. He was then advised to use the mouse, which he did – assuming that it is used as a microphone.

The second scene is from “Galaxy Quest” a science-fiction parody in which a group of actors of a science-fiction series is abducted by an alien race that is watching the series and mistaking them for real heroes. A copy of the (fictional) starship is made and the ‘crew’ is forced to use it to help them. A difficult task for the actors, who only pretended to control the spaceship until then.

The third and last one is a short part of an episode of the cartoon series “Futurama”: The scene shows a group of people talking about a person called “Fry” and the computer listened and assisted by downloading a movie about this person and opening the owners calendar on Friday and ordering some french fries.

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6. Conclusions

We have seen that only more recent movies show attempts to design their HCI more carefully. Especially “Minority Report” was a major source of interesting material, because of its extensive scientific research and its thorough preparation. Others try to adapt technologies that were already available and improve them, but concepts of HCI research are normally not addressed. The main reason might be that HCI is still a relatively young research area and slowly becoming more popular during the past decade. Another reason could also be that human centred, pervasive or ubiquitous computing could look very inconspicuous, whereas high-tech in movies should preferably appear more spectacular.
Old movies sometimes inspired contemporary research, but mostly only in implementation details in order to acknowledge classic popular movies. More recent movies also have the advantage that special effects technology is continuously advancing and also the budgets of main stream productions such the possibilities of directors increase as well.
In most movies we could observe a tendency towards conversational speech as an interface and 3 dimensional displays that work without head-mounted devices. Both of it is relatively easy to realize by filmmakers and a straightforward improvement of current technology, not from a technical but from an imaginative point of view.
Identification technologies are also often made a topic of discussion, but with a much higher impact on sociological aspects than on interaction design.

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References:

[1] Nogala, Detlef: Der ‘genetische Fingerabdruck’ http://www.cilip.de/ausgabe/61/dna.htm

[2] http://www.printrakinternational.com/omnitrak.htm
http://www.necsolutions-am.com/idsolutions/products/palmprint_product.cfm

[3] Publications by John Daugman: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jgd1000/

[4] The DynaWall: http://www.ipsi.fhg.de/ambiente/english/projekte/projekte/dynawall.html

[5] Ubiquitous computing, „tabs“, „pads“ and „boards“: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html

[6] Table-Top Spatially-Augmented Reality: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~raskar/Tabletop/

[7] The Office of the Future Project: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~raskar/Office/

[8] The IRREAL scenario: http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/irreal/

[9] PEACH publications by M. Kruppa: http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~mkruppa/rp.html

[10] Marble Answering Machine mentioned in: Gillian Crampton Smith, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. I.D., May/June 1995, pp. 60-65

[11] E Ink corporation: http://www.eink.com

 

Movie References:

Metropolis (1927, Germany) directed by Fritz Lang

Raumschiff Orion (1966, West Germany) directed by Rolf Honold

Battlestar Galactica (1978, USA) created by Glen A. Larson

Password Swordfish (2001, USA) directed by D. Sena

Johnny Mnemonic (1995, USA/Canada) directed by Robert Longo

The Matrix (1999, USA) directed by the Wachowski Brothers

Logan’s Run (1976, USA) directed by Michael Anderson

Gattaca (1997, USA) directed by Andrew Niccol

Alien 4 (1997, USA) Jean-Perre Jeunet

The Bourne Identity (2002, USA/Germany) directed by Doug Liman

Minority Report (2002, USA) directed by Steven Spielberg

Total Recall (1990, USA) directed by Paul Verhoeven

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987, USA) created by Gene Roddenberry

The Matrix Reloaded (2003, USA) directed by the Wachowski Brothers

X-Men (2002, USA) directed by Brian Singer

Forbidden Planet (1956, USA) directed by Fred M. Wilcox

Star Trek Enterprise (2001, USA) created by Rick Berman

2001 – A Space Odyssey (1978, USA) directed by Stanley Kubrick

Dark Star (1974, USA) directed by John Carpenter

Time Machine (2002, USA) directed by Simon Wells

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981, UK) directed by Alan Bell

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, USA) directed by Leonard Nimoy

Galaxy Quest (1999, USA) directed by Dean Parisot

Futurama (1999 – 2003) by Matt Groening

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