Design Directives: Remaking Robocop's Interface for the 21st Century onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Design Directives: Remaking Robocop's Interface for the 21st Century

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The Robocop remake doesn't just reinvent his outer shell with a sleek new shape — it also changes how the cyborg police officer sees the rest of the world. We spoke to lead designer Mert Kizilay from the L.A. design studio yU+Co about creating a new user interface for Robocop.

Some spoilers for Robocop below...

Designing an interface for Robocop was really difficult, says Kizilay, because a lot of key shots in the movie have no dialogue — so director Jose Padilha and editor Daniel Rezende were counting on the cybernetic U.I. to show what was going on. The design had to be "really clean and simplistic to communicate well," says Kizilay.

The biggest challenge? Some of the shots in the movie are really short, time-wise, so you have to pack a lot of information into a shot that only appears for a couple of seconds. The designers tried to pack in as much sophistication as possible to make it seem like a real cyborg operating system, but some of their early efforts contained too much information for audiences to absorb in just a couple of seconds. So they had to dial back to keep it understandable to the audience, while still trying to "simplify in a smart way."

"It's a hard balance," says Kizilay, "to keep simplicity and still have interesting and smart things on the screen."

Here are a couple of concepts that represent the explorations the designers did from "generative art" they used to create the ideas for Robocop's vision:

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Padilha "didn't want to go super-futuristic and crazy" with the look of Robocop's graphics, says Kizilay. "He wanted something convincing and believable, and possible to see in the near future." With that end in mind, they looked a lot at real-life systems for scanning closed-circuit televisions, GPS readouts, maps and strategic readouts of trajectories and so on.

"We were all influenced by the real approach of user interface design" in current systems," he explains. "If you were designing a gadget, what would this gadget be in 10 years? We have a bunch of shots where Robocop is scanning the environment and calculating his upcoming strategies about the situation, and we always tried to think what would happen in the future."

Here's a process shot, showing Robocop's graphics, the scene it was overlaid onto, and then the final composite:

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"We tried some futuristic and military looks, but because Robocop still has his human side, we wanted to make it a real operating system, so he's in control," adds Kizilay. "He's controlling that stuff, he's not animating on graphics. This is an interface that's getting used and interacted with by Robocop himself." They wanted to give the sense that he was always running simulations and checking strategies.

Check out another composite shot in progress:

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And the designers really did try to create a whole consistent operating system, that would make sense as something that could actually exist. There are more than 100 shots in the film that show Robocop dealing with different situations, from Robocop's point of view.

So "keeping things consistent was a challenge," says Kizilay. "We made a lot of mistakes." The director kept reviewing their work and changing things in mid-process, and "things started to get messy." So as a solution, they created a pool that contained elements that had already been approved, so "we could assure consistency. Everybody could pull elements out of that pool."

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So the designers had to sit down and figure out, "If this was an OS, how would it operate? He has certain gadgets, how will he use them? And if he wants to combine them, how will they work together?"

In terms of a metaphor, they thought of all the tools that he can access as "surrounding his head," as if all the gadgets and graphics could slide in from the top, bottom and sides of his vision. "So he can easily combine them, and if he doesn't need them, he can slide them off and bring them in again. It's all united and easy to access. We can track where the tools are going. We can track what he's doing," so it's not "animated randomly."

Also, the designers tried to "show one thing at a time," so they could see what Robocop was doing, in order, instead of a jumble of events. So you can see what Robocop is achieving at any moment, based on the situation.

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The designers also tried to make Robocop's target look like sort of like the OmniCorp logo, making it vaguely octagon shape. Since Robocop is still a product of OmniCorp, they wanted to make sure it looked properly branded.

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This movie never shows Robocop accessing his four directives, including "Uphold the Law" or "Protect the Innocent," the way he does in the original film. We asked whether the designers ever experimented with including those in the film — and Kizilay says "not directly." But they have lots of scenes where Robocop is deciding who's innocent and who's a threat, including accessing police databases and live CCTV footage.

Robocop has a "detective mode," sort of like Batman in Arkham Asylum, where he can search in real time for clues and information from CCTV and other sources. He can scan people and check their eye movements to see if they're lying. "It was really challenging," says Kizilay. "Jose was asking questions like, 'What would a real cop do in this situation?' We were forcing ourselves to think logically and put ourselves into that situation, just like Robocop."

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One of the most intense scenes in the film is when the cops upload the entire past CCTV database into Robocop's mind, and it eventually overloads him. Says Kizilay, "He is filtering those images, and then detecting those crimes, and detecting the criminals and archiving those. We wanted to show a really massive scene [of video overload streaming into his brain.]"

"There's a really nice emotional intensity in that scene," adds Kizilay. "We wanted to show [that] they are uploading the images and he is getting into it, he's picking the images, detecting crimes one by one — but it's so much, tons of footage and hundreds of crimes, one by one, he needs to go faster and faster" until he gets too much.

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It was a "bold decision" for the film-makers to rely so much on graphics to tell their story, says Kizilay. The graphics are really "married to the movie," and require a lot of interaction to get across key plot points.

"One shot is a big deal: He is actually re-simulating his own crime scene. It's all graphics. The shots we needed to tell the story in a short amount of time, [many] of them are pure graphics," adds Kizilay. "It is the next level of telling a story through graphics."

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Check out a couple more progress shots, showing how the graphics were added to existing shots in the film, below:

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Design Directives: Remaking Robocop's Interface for the 21st Century

Jai Courtney is our new Kyle Reese in Terminator: Genesis onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Jai Courtney is our new Kyle Reese in Terminator: Genesis

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Come with me if you want to find out who is playing the new Kyle Reese.

Deadline is reporting that Terminator: Genesis has found its new Kyle Reese: Jai Courtney. Apparently the role has been offered to him, but everything is not yet finalized. If all goes well, Courtney (who is best known for not much besides Jack Reacher and the not yet released Divergent) could star in not one but two Terminator movies, that will allegedly end the saga once and for all — since James Cameron is getting the rights back in 2018 and has no interest in making further movies.

But can Courtney pull off the Michael Beihn grin? The film will be directed by Game of Thrones and Thor 2 director Alan Taylor, and has the release date of July 1st 2015 (which is not that far away). Fingers crossed.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Jai Courtney is our new Kyle Reese in Terminator: Genesis

Temporary Blindness May Give You Superhuman Hearing onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Temporary Blindness May Give You Superhuman Hearing

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Losing your sight early in life is often said to heighten other senses, particularly hearing. A new study now shows that even a short, weeklong stint in complete darkness can result in superhuman hearing, at least temporarily. This suggests that a kind of darkness therapy may help restore hearing to adults suffering from hearing loss.

Musicians Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, who were both blinded at a young age, are often cited as examples of how the lack of sight can enhance hearing. And over the years, research has suggested that people who lost their sight early in life do, in fact, hear better than their non-blind counterparts.

"They have better frequency discrimination and spatial localization," explained Patrick Kanold, a biologist at the University of Maryland, who studies how the brain processes sound. "They have superhuman hearing."

Similarly, research has also shown that people born deaf use their auditory cortex — the region of the brain that deals with sound — to process tactile and visual information, and even have enhanced sight.

These effects, however, only appear to occur in people who lost one of their senses at an early age, or from birth. Reason being: There is a so-called critical period, during which the brain is most adaptable to sensory stimuli, including new sights and sounds. "Your brain is very malleable during early development, and then after a certain point, it's not," Kanold told io9.

Studies have shown that the connections, or synapses, between cortical neurons — nerve cells in the cerebral cortex of the brain, which processes sensory information and is vital for thinking and reasoning, among other things — remain malleable long into adulthood. On the other hand, the synapses between neurons in the thalamus (a kind of sensory information relay center) and the cortex, called thalamocortical synapses, were thought to be pretty much set after the critical period.

But recent research has suggested otherwise, leading Kanold and his colleagues to wonder if thalamocortical synapses in the visual cortex and auditory cortex change when the senses are disrupted after the critical period. In effect, this would mean that vision or hearing loss in adulthood could actually alter and even improve other senses. The team decided to find out if this was the case.

A Simple Experiment

The researchers conducted a simple experiment, in which they placed mice that were "way beyond their critical period" in complete darkness for 6-8 days. These mice, Kanold explained, had normal hearing and vision. They then brought the mice back into the light to test their hearing.

The researchers put the mice into a soundproof chamber and played one-note tones of varying frequencies and loudness, while they recorded the mice's brain activity. The auditory neurons of the temporarily blinded mice were better able to discriminate pitch and respond to softer sounds than the neurons of mice that weren't subjected to weeklong darkness. What's more, the visual deprivation strengthened the thalamocortical synapses in the mice's primary auditory cortex, but not those in the mice's primary visual cortex.

"The results were quite surprising," Kanold said. "Given what we know about blind people, we expected to see some change in the mice's brains, but these results were a lot larger than we expected."

The researchers suspect that a similar effect would occur in people placed in prolonged darkness. However, they don't know how long the darkness would need to last — it may take many more weeks before any hearing improvements develop. Before anyone can conducts such tests, the researchers will be investigating how to make the hearing improvement permanent. In their mouse experiments, the rodents reverted back to normal hearing a few weeks after returning to a normal dark-light cycle. Simply keeping the mice in pure darkness for a longer period of time may prolong the hearing enhancements.

"If it works in humans, we could use this technique in a variety of clinical situations to improve recovery of functions in the brain," Kanold said. Specifically, he foresees darkness therapy being useful for patients with cochlear implants, which are much more effective in children than adults. These electronic devices work by electrically simulating the auditory nerves in the inner ear, ultimately providing a sense of sound to people who are hard-of-hearing or completely deaf. Putting adults in darkness while they begin to use the implants may help them adjust to the devices and help their brains better process the new sounds.

The technique could also, presumably, be used to help people better process visual information. In another experiment, Kanold and his colleagues experimentally deafened mice and looked at their thalamocortical synapses. In this case, the synapses became stronger in the visual cortex, but not the auditory cortex.

Read the study in the journal Neuron.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Temporary Blindness May Give You Superhuman Hearing