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Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: At Motherboard, Alex Pasternack writes: "Star Wars is set in a world of wildly advanced technology. But take a good look at the machinery of Star Wars, and you may be surprised to see how wonderfully analog it all is -- buttons! levers! vector graphics! Yes, there are hyperdrives and lightsabers and hologram Princess Leias and droids that know six million languages (including the language of moisture vaporators, along with various etiquette and diplomatic protocols useful across the galaxy). But it's also a world where sometimes you have to hit a robot to get it to work, like an old dashboard radio, a place where the supercomputers are operated manually and where buttons and control panels and screens seem far removed from our own galaxy: tactile, lo-fi, and elegantly simple." May the 4th be with you.
My graphics prof told us that the people hired to do the graphics for Star Wars were instructed to make it look more primitive. The technology already existed to do filled colored polygons and deal with pop-up and so forth. But when Lucas or whoever saw their first pass, they said it looked too good. So for example, in the trench run briefing, you see that they went to green wireframes with massive pop-up problems where big chunks just suddenly appear.
It's low-fi because Dune was lo-fi. As "The Secret History of Star Wars" reveals, the original treatment even included "spice", which became "the force". The SW universe has Tatooine ("totally not the desert planet Arrakis of the Dune series." Dune had a reason for their analog high tech: The Butlerian Jihad forbade machines which could think, and destroyed all instances of such tech. In the Star Wars universe we scratch our heads and wonder why the low-fi... Well, now you know, it was a wonderful aesthetic borrowed from Dune and is thus otherwise inexplicable.
I love the scene where a bearing has fallen off one of the droids and it didn't incapacitate them. The logical result should have been R2D2 spinning in circles.
Why is tactile interface using buttons and levers bad? - is it just because a touch screen is so fashionable currently? Touchscreens serve for some use cases - Emulating buttons in a screen instead of real buttons is like a human living his life (outside the screen) with only one finger . We have so many degrees of control and feedback available in our hands, legs and we should use them effectively to interact with devices. An example is that of a car. This hand-eye-leg combined interface is what creates the feeling of 'oneness' with the machine - like how many of us feel that the car has become our extension - we are in full control.
Touchscreen as the sole interface is a short term aberration and I think soon the industry start bringing back tactile (and not just limited to pressing buttons - but also to levers & knobs).
Fourth of May is "official" Star Wars day.
Please throw your geek card into one of the recycling chutes provided before jumping down a reactor shaft.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed
Oh my god, you're right, I totally missed the fact that Star Wars is set in a grubby, dirty universe with clunky robots and thinks that fall apart! I mean, it was so subtle I never even saw it. Mind. Blown.
Sheesh.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Many of the props and sets in Star Wars (1977) were not meticulously designed like modern blockbusters. This was considered a low-budget movie.
Lots of props and set details were therefore literally built from junk if only to save money. A lot of it was airplane scrap, in fact. The prop makers also had a manufacturer of high-end record players next door from which they got lots of small parts with minor defects.
As an extreme example there is Obi-Wan's lightsaber: it was built from an 1940's airplane engine, a WWI rifle grenade, a 1970's calculator, a WWII machine gun, a 1930's camera flash and a 1970's faucet knob.
One of my hobbies is building replicas of props from movies, and the Star Wars movie in particular. For me it is great that there are real-parts that I could chase down to build something exactly like in the movies. However, it does sometimes get a bit expensive and there have been clashes with for instance, collectors of vintage cameras.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Designers of 1970s movies used examples from 1970s.
How is this news? Take a look at the Deathstar's control panel. It is right from a 1970s era power station control room, a cutting edge one at that.
Aliens has everything from green-phosphor, text-only teletype-speed consoles to yellow-screen laptops, to low-res monochrome blocky graphics, to huge "TVs" full of monochrome photographs and green text. .
Even for the sentry guns, the remote piloting via a huge satellite uplink, the Earth-based personnel records, the hypersleep computers, the blueprint machines, the health read-outs, the motion sensors, etc. etc. etc.
In a movie, the tech shown is what feels / looks good, not what would actually be used (e.g. nmap in The Matrix Reloaded), and even back in the day teletype terminals were long dead, but the ddddrrrtttttt of text appearing one letter at a time is much more cinematic:
File Closed.
At first glance, when I thought about the analog computer interface you see R2D2 using all the time, I thought "how stupid - a mechanical interface between computers". But then, the more I thought about it, it actually made sense. It's clear it is a rotational interface, like turning a dial. Well, what precision can an object be rotated to? How man "positions" can it be in? It's infinite. Pi never ends or repeats, so you can go into infinite precision as to the rotational position of a knob. They are only limited by their technological ability to detect rotational position (which could be done through an electromagnetic field). So it is conceivable they have the ability to detect the rotational position with some incredible precision, thus a single rotation of the knob, by stopping at some specific position, could transfer a vast amount of information. The interface can of course be 2-way. Sometimes R2 is rotating the interface, and sometimes the host machine is rotating. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
Better known as 318230.
You'll see things here that look odd or even antiquated to modern eyes. Phones with cords, awkward manual valves, computers that, well, barely deserve the name...
It was all designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and disrupt even the most basic computer systems.
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
I think you need to give your keyboard a whack too.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The Death Star's "death beam" control panel was a Grass Valley Model 100 Video Switcher, and I know that only because I used one of those at that time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.