2018-09-01_Popular_Science_Australia.pdf

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COM.AU
OXFORD STREET LEEDERVILLE
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SURGICAL SPIDERS :
Why softer robots will make better, safer doctors
A SMART
TELESCOPE
(for citizen science)
SMALL IS
IMPORTANT
Tiny things that keep
the world working
LITTLE CARS
Why we still
make them
THE RISE
OF EMOJI
And the future of
expressing yourself
THE LATE
NIGHT BLUES
Your phone really is
making you blind
FUTURE
of
FLYING
Lap of luxury...
...or Hell off Earth?
ISSUE #118, SEPTEMBER 2
18
EDITORIAL
Editor
Anthony Fordham
afordham@nextmedia.com.au
DESIGN
Group Art Director
Malcolm Campbell
Art Director
Danny McGonigle
ADVERTISING
Advertising Sales
Lewis Preece lpreece@nextmedia.com.au
Advertising Traffic
Diane Preece dpreece@nextmedia.com.au
Division General Manager
Jim Preece jpreece@nextmedia.com.au
The Technology
is
the Personal
The most unrealistic thing about TV’s
The Expanse
- a science iction
show with magical fusion drives that operate for weeks and never run
out of fuel, and magical people who stay in space for years and never
run out of bone minerals - is the mobile phones.
Not because of the way they project
holograms around the room or have icons
that loat in mid-air next to them. No, the
unrealistic part is how all the personal
communications tech in
The Expanse
looks the same.
According to
The Expanse
’s
exhaustively detailed wiki, the handsets
people use in that universe (about
250 years in our future) are just dumb
terminals. They hook into some kind
of ubiquitous computing service that’s
everywhere - embedded in the walls even
- and your mobile phone bill relects how
much computing power you used over
the month, or whatever.
And that’s a prediction I can get behind.
We’ve already oloaded all our non-
personal data storage to the internet, and
we’re in the process of giving “the cloud”
our personal stuf too.
But what
The Expanse
doesn’t do, or
at least not explicitly enough for me to
notice, is let its characters personalise the
user experience of their mobiles.
It might seem like a tiny thing, but the
way you can have your background and
your icons, and a hideous protective cover
in your preferred shade of electric pink, is
a huge part of why the smartphone has so
efectively penetrated our culture.
In 2018, a person’s smartphone is their
little oasis, their own little world, in a way.
For an increasing (and maybe disturbing)
number of people, the smartphone has
become very much part of them.
I’m just picking on
The Expanse
because
the handsets appear every other episode,
but the way the show has characters use
their “mobiles” for nothing more than
making video calls and occasionally
remote-controlling some piece of
space-equipment, makes the amazingly
well-done holographic displays pointless.
Plot-wise, they could do those scenes
exactly the same way with Star Trek
communicators. From the original series.
I have some sympathy for the show’s
designers, though. People in the real
world take what has been a carefully
designed interface and customise it to
look hideous. They put their icons in
really awkward places. They clog up
the display with widgets that hardly do
anything. They set their background to a
badly composed, blurry picture of their
cat. Drooling. Because “it’s how I like it”.
The people who make up future
computer interfaces for TV shows spend
thousands of hours designing graphical
elements and making it all work
together... so asking them to then go and
do a really ugly badly set up version for
each character is maybe too much.
But if these shows want realism, to
make these worlds feel “lived in”, that
really is what should be done. Every sign
shouldn’t be in the same font, some UX
elements should clash and get in each
other’s way. That’s how the world works.
Well, mostly. I’ve been driving Audi’s
RS5 coupe this month. Great car, and it
has a high-tech “virtual cockpit” where
all the gauges are computerised and
turn into diferent things when you push
buttons on the steering wheel.
It’s also a real-world example of what
life
would
be like if we had to live with
science iction TV show user interface
designs. Oh it’s all very
consistent,
stylistically. But to open the settings
menu, you need to press a button marked
with a square-bracket. To change drive
modes? Asterisk button.
And I can’t even put a picture of a
drooling cat in the background.
ANTHONY FORDHAM
Production Manager
Peter Ryman
Circulation Director
Carole Jones
US EDITION
Editor in Chief
Joe Brown
Articles Editor
Kevin Gray
Managing Editor
Jill C. Shomer
Senior Editor
Sophie Bushwick
Technology Editor
Xavier Harding
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Acting Design Director
Chris Mueller
Photo Director
Thomas Payne
Digital Associate Art Director
Michael Moreno
Associate Art Director
Russ Smith
Acting Production Manager
Paul Catalano
POPSCI.COM
Online Director
Carl Franzen
BONNIER’S TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Group Editorial Director
Anthony Licata
Group Publisher
Gregory D Gatto
BONNIER
Chairman
Tomas Franzen
Chief Executive Officer
Eric Zinczenko
Chief Content Officer
David Ritchie
Chief Operating Officer
Lisa Earlywine
Senior Vice President, Digital
Bruno Sousa
Vice President, Consumer Marketing
John Reese
Executive Chairman
David Gardiner
Managing Director
Hamish Bayliss
Circulation Director
Carole Jones
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edition reprinted with permission of Bonnier Corporation. Articles express
the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Publisher,
Editor or nextmedia Pty Ltd. ISSN 1835-9876.
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P O P S C I .CO M . AU
3
SEPTEMBER 2018
Contents
For daily updates:
www.popsci.com.au
40
But What
About On
The Inside?
Future airliners look super cool. Future
airliner cabins for economy-class
passengers? Not so much. From seats that
don’t recline, to having to squat on a sort of
saddle for two hours, is there nothing too
awful for the industry to contemplate? No.
04
POPULAR SCIENCE

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