Humour

More unreality checks

T A Balasubramanian on the art of making unrealistic movie technologies appear real for the viewers

“The idea of using technology in a Hollywood movie is to make every action appear realistic to the majority of the audience. Whether it is actually realistic is not much of a concern to the movie makers. Sure, that will seem ridiculous to a small percentage of the audience, such as you IT savvy guys, who have the experience to make out the bluff, but from a box-office perspective the geeks are not an important section.”

Ironica Asimova, founder and head of Ironica Robotica, is talking to you, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, and Danny DeVito, your CTO and associate—who is actually a biped walking humanoid originally designed by Asimova. With her pile of streaked hair, and a slinky dark dress, she looks gorgeous.

You are visiting the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), a popular IT exhibition space.

“Well, so be it,” you respond. “Hollywood movie-makers would fancy all your offerings, for sure. I have always enjoyed the nonsensical exaggerations and the wild imaginations of the set designers who make these movies. For example, those immense fonts used for ‘Access Denied’ messages that confront desperate heroines. Most computer screens in the movies feature big, easily readable text. In real life, no matter how big the display, we get eye-strain reading tiny text from lousy websites that add insult to injury by not letting users resize the words.”

“You are right there, Papyrus,” laughs Asimova. “Large text is an obvious concession to the viewing experience. Moviegoers—who pay for the ticket to enjoy an experience in a theatre—must be able to see what’s popping up on the screen. Even so, enlarging the information so that it looks like a hoarding does make it surreal.”

“Never mind. After all you named your venture Make-Believe Invention, or MBI, so who’s complaining?”

“Not me, certainly,” says DeVito, brightly.

“Hmm. You, being an advanced cybernetic machine, have no trouble talking to humans—or understanding them, eh, Danny? Well, it’s not that simple in primitive Hollywood. So when they made a voice-operated computer like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it was actually a good example of designing a cinema audience interface—rather than a user interface.”

“True, but it is a terrible way of controlling a complex system,” you say. “While it is nice to chat with DeVito here, voice has its place. I think it is harder to specify something in words to a machine than to choose it on a graphical display.”

“Ah, Papyrus, that’s where MBI comes in to take the naïve audience believe the not-for-real actions they see. Spoken commands and spoken responses make it easy for the audience to follow the action. They feel that the machine can indeed be like a human.”

“Hey, I’m the living proof of that,” says DeVito, winking.

“Oh, you’re much more, Danny,” says Asimova, proudly. “But, Papyrus, forget MBI for the moment. Let me tell you about some of the most novel and most challenging work being done for the real world at Robotica. We are putting speech recognition into all kinds of gadgets, where it was previously thought infeasible—into toys and MP3 players, car navigation and entertainment systems, and cell phones and PDAs.”

“You can get me talking to my handheld gizmo instead of pressing buttons?”

“Indeed we can. We are pushing for embedded speech in devices at just the right time. Designers are trying to cram ever more functions into ever smaller devices. So there’s just not enough room for all the buttons and displays on something so small that you can stuff it into your pocket. A voice interface that lets you say the name of that Beatles song you want to listen to, rather than squinting and browsing through your iPod’s multiple menus is already here. We see voice as a great complement to the visual and touch user interfaces.”

“Wow, that makes me nervous,” says DeVito. “Like HAL, I do have an emotional life, too you know.”

“What’s there to fear, Danny?” you say. “You’re not feeling threatened by iPods becoming a little responsive to voice commands, are you?”

“Hey, it’s the beginning of a new wave of little HALs coming to challenge my superior status as the sole empathetic humanoid.”

“That’s not going to happen, Danny,” says Asimova, grinning. “By the time the present-day iPods become smart enough to become CTOs, you would have moved ahead, too. You’re built to learn from your experience—I should know, because I made you.”

“All right, we know you did,” you say. “But let’s get back to MBI, shall we?”

“Ah, yes,” sighs Asimova. “Another area we tackle to give Hollywood more style than substance is called Far Fetched Gizmos or FFGs. You may recall how in the movie “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the unflappable James Bond drives his sleek gadget-loaded car from the back seat with a mobile phone that works as the car’s remote control. Now that’s an FFG you haven’t really seen yet.”

“Ooh, yes. Brosnan drives real fast, while evading the bad guys,” says DeVito, cheerful again.

Says Asimova, “Another MBI special device is called the Elegant Email. In any movie, checking your mail is a matter of zooming in on the exact nugget that is important to the plot. The heroine logs on, and the only message that pops up obediently on the screen with a single tap—is the one that reveals the key to the whole mystery.”

“Awesome, eh?” says DeVito. “No information pollution or nasty spam!”

“Oh, come on—let’s see her having to do some grunt work to get to the vital information,” you groan. “How about having to run a clean-the-junk utility on top of the ISP spam filters or a desktop search tool to dig around in the totally unstructured pile of read email sitting on the computer? At least then we might feel some empathy for the heroine.”