The Science of Avatar by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Body, Film & Video, Performing Arts, Science, Performing Arts / Film & Video - General, General, UFOs & Extraterrestrials, Mind & Spirit / Ufo'S & Extraterrestrials, Mind & Spirit, Physics, Science / Science / Physics / General
ISBN: 9780316224017
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2012-05-29T07:00:00+00:00

Another technological advance obvious in Hell’s Gate is computer technology.

Consider the Hell’s Gate Ops Centre control room. (Avatar’s creative team visited such locations as a real-world oil rig, the gigantic Noble Clyde Boudreaux in the Gulf of Mexico, to use as a model for interiors like this.) We see large-scale wraparound screens that respond to the touch and movement of the operator. In another instance, in the avatar lab, Max Patel swipes one tablet-like screen over another, taking an image to carry away with him to show Grace Augustine, as easily as he might pull a piece of paper from a pin-board. Three-dimensional displays are the norm, and there is an emphasis on graphic and tactile interactions, in an environment saturated with computing. These scenes recall recent experiments in “ubiquitous computing,” in which computers become embedded in the surroundings. Nokia’s Ubice is one prototype. In Microsoft’s Lightspace system, surfaces in a lecture room become screens for displaying documents and images; like Max you can pick up a virtual item from one display and move it to another.

The Ops Centre also features a holotable, with a continuously updated summary of conditions across RDA’s operations on Pandora. This is a very impressive, fully searchable holographic display, which Jake is able to reach into, tracing for Quaritch the internal structure of Hometree with his hands. Holography, the science of 3-D projection, is quite an old technology. The principles on which it is based were first set out in 1947 by the British physicist Dennis Gabor, who got a Nobel Prize for his trouble. Information about the amplitude and phase of light waves—that is, how intense they are and how they relate to each other—are stored as patterns of interference. Computer programs “ray-trace” back from these interference patterns to recreate the light rays that gave rise to those patterns, and so give the illusion that the object that emitted or reflected the light in the first place is present. Indeed, that “object” might only ever have existed in the electronic imagination of a computer.

Human-machine interaction (HMI) is the academic study of the interaction between people and computers. It is the intersection of a number of fields, from ergonomics and human factors to computer design. It arose partly because of bad examples of human-machine interfaces leading to calamity—for instance, it is thought that the Three Mile Island nuclear accident was partly due to operators struggling with a poor and confusing interface. HMI practitioners develop theories of interaction, come up with design methodologies and processes, and invent new kinds of interfaces and interaction techniques. A long-term goal is to minimise the barriers between a human’s cognitive model of what she wants to accomplish and the machine’s understanding of the task.

This makes sense in terms of what we see of the computer interfaces in Avatar, which seem a logical development from modern technology, our tablets and smart phones, with their applications which respond to touch, and can sense physical movements such as tipping and shaking thanks to internal accelerometers and GPS positional awareness.

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