Vortex
Mongoose
When it was last brought up on the forum, the weapon control system from Legend of the Rangers received quite a beating from most members. Personally, I think it is one of the coolest things I've ever seen and I want to try and explain why.
First, you have to look beyond a very average actress punching at mines and look at the concept and possibilities of the technology itself. Here's what it offers:
-A 180 degrees display in all 3 dimensions.
-A position allowing totally unrestrained body movement (even while sitting your leg movements are limited, not while floating)
-A system that can monitor pretty much any movement your entire body makes. (It is clearly established that it can acquire targets based on eye movement so I guess it can at least monitor movements down to finger movements)
-An apparently very powerful software interpreting those movements (While in the comet trail, she was rotating while remaining virtually immobile so the commands she gave with her movements had to be very subtle but still seamed quite precise)
To me, short of direct link between the brain and the computer, this is pretty much the ultimate interface.
The thing to remember is that a computer interface can be customised per user. It's even possible on Windows today so the Minbari must have discovered it!
Any user can have his own set of commands which can be something very different from punches and kicks. The girl in the movie clearly has a violent temperament and is quite a fighter. Also, to some martial artists, these moves are so natural they become second nature. In that case, it makes sense to choose these moves as commands (exept maybe for getting tired) because the fight is much more intuitive than pressing buttons so your reaction time is better.
Another user could use very different moves. I easily conceive a religious Minbari calm and immobile almost in a trance using small finger, head and eye movement to operate the system. The possibilities are endless.
Just look at your hand. You have two joints per finger that you can operate independently (the last one is harder to control individually so we'll just not use it). That gives you 4 positions per finger (unbent-unbent, bent-unbent, unbent-bent and bent-bent). That's 1024 combinations with 5 fingers. Now let's consider only 3 positions for the hand: (bent forward, bent back and unbent). Were up to 3072 positions and that's just for one hand. If you combine it with the other hand, you're up to 9,437,184 still leaving the rest of the body and the eyes out of the equation.
Obviously, this would require a great amount of training but would also become very intuitive at some point. You must also remember that these are people from 250 years into the future; these things are more natural for them. Imagine someone from 1750 watching you typing while you chat, they would not understand how you can use all these buttons at this speed…
I would like to know what everyone thinks about this view of the system.
First, you have to look beyond a very average actress punching at mines and look at the concept and possibilities of the technology itself. Here's what it offers:
-A 180 degrees display in all 3 dimensions.
-A position allowing totally unrestrained body movement (even while sitting your leg movements are limited, not while floating)
-A system that can monitor pretty much any movement your entire body makes. (It is clearly established that it can acquire targets based on eye movement so I guess it can at least monitor movements down to finger movements)
-An apparently very powerful software interpreting those movements (While in the comet trail, she was rotating while remaining virtually immobile so the commands she gave with her movements had to be very subtle but still seamed quite precise)
To me, short of direct link between the brain and the computer, this is pretty much the ultimate interface.
The thing to remember is that a computer interface can be customised per user. It's even possible on Windows today so the Minbari must have discovered it!
Any user can have his own set of commands which can be something very different from punches and kicks. The girl in the movie clearly has a violent temperament and is quite a fighter. Also, to some martial artists, these moves are so natural they become second nature. In that case, it makes sense to choose these moves as commands (exept maybe for getting tired) because the fight is much more intuitive than pressing buttons so your reaction time is better.
Another user could use very different moves. I easily conceive a religious Minbari calm and immobile almost in a trance using small finger, head and eye movement to operate the system. The possibilities are endless.
Just look at your hand. You have two joints per finger that you can operate independently (the last one is harder to control individually so we'll just not use it). That gives you 4 positions per finger (unbent-unbent, bent-unbent, unbent-bent and bent-bent). That's 1024 combinations with 5 fingers. Now let's consider only 3 positions for the hand: (bent forward, bent back and unbent). Were up to 3072 positions and that's just for one hand. If you combine it with the other hand, you're up to 9,437,184 still leaving the rest of the body and the eyes out of the equation.
Obviously, this would require a great amount of training but would also become very intuitive at some point. You must also remember that these are people from 250 years into the future; these things are more natural for them. Imagine someone from 1750 watching you typing while you chat, they would not understand how you can use all these buttons at this speed…
I would like to know what everyone thinks about this view of the system.
