Minority report

Overview

The Minority Report, a short story by Philip K. Dick, published in Fantastic Universe in January 1956. Adapted as Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg, released 2002, with a screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen. Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, chief of Precrime; Samantha Morton plays Agatha; Colin Farrell plays the investigator sent to audit the department.

The premise in both versions is a police division that arrests people for murders they have not yet committed, acting on visions produced by three precognitives. The title refers to the dissenting vision: when the three do not agree, the outlying report is filed and suppressed, because its existence would undermine the system's claim to certainty.

The film relocates the story to Washington, D.C., in 2054.

The 2054 summit

In 1999 Spielberg invited fifteen experts, futurists, architects, and computer scientists to a Santa Monica hotel for a three-day think tank summit. The roster included the futurist Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business Network; the computer scientist Jaron Lanier; Neil Gershenfeld of MIT; the author Douglas Coupland; and the architect Peter Calthorpe.

Their task was to predict what Washington, D.C. would look like in 2054. The output was the 2054 Bible, an 80-page guide covering architecture, advertising, and criminal justice, compiled by production designer Alex McDowell and used as the blueprint for the film.

Most of what the summit predicted now exists: gesture interfaces, retina scanning, personalised advertising, predictive policing software, autonomous vehicles, and facial recognition.

Minority Report's Gestural Interface

John Underkoffler, born 1967, took his SB, SM, and PhD in media arts and sciences from MIT, completing the doctorate in 1999. Spielberg invited MIT computer scientists to collaborate on the production, encouraging them to approach the design work as if it were an R&D effort, and in Underkoffler's account that is what it became.

Spielberg's brief was that the interface should be like conducting an orchestra. Underkoffler then devised a complete sign language for interacting with the computer and controlling the flow of information, drawing on his earlier MIT research.

The critical point is that this was not a special effect. The gestural vocabulary was a working system, later called g-speak, under development at the Media Lab since the early 1990s. Its departure from the desktop metaphor is that it lets a person handle things on the computer as if they were physical objects.

Interface Legacy

Underkoffler was approached by countless investors and CEOs asking whether it was real and whether they could pay him to build it if it was not. Raytheon helped finance G-Speak, LLC in 2005, and he founded Oblong Industries in 2006 to develop it into products.

The g-speak platform, introduced publicly in 2008, supports multi-user, multi-device gesture control for data visualisation, using depth-sensing cameras and software to interpret hand poses without contact. Oblong's stated applications were analysis of large datasets, three-dimensional interfaces, and multi-user collaborative work. Clients included defence, energy, financial institutions, Boeing, and GE. By 2012 the US Air Force had integrated comparable gesture systems for command-and-control. Joi Ito, then director of the MIT Media Lab, joined the Oblong board in 2014.

When there was an idea about why the interface did not take off, Underkoffler noted that a totally new type of user interface is not for everyone, stating that "people do not know what they want in a UI".

Microsoft's Kinect, released November 2010, delivered consumer gesture control instead, without the gloves and without the vocabulary.

The design objection

Underkoffler's interface became the most influential fictional UI in cinema, imitated in Iron Man, Tron: Legacy, and a long run of tech demos. The standard criticism, made by the designer Christian Brown in The Awl, is that it prioritises what looks good over what feels good, and functions as the pornography of user experience design: visually spectacular, functionally questionable.

The physical objection is older than the film. Sustained mid-air gesturing fatigues the shoulder and arm within minutes, a problem named gorilla arm in touchscreen research in the 1980s. Anderton conducts for a few minutes of screen time. A shift is eight hours.

This is the most useful thing about the sequence for anyone designing interfaces. It is a demonstration of what an interface looks like when the requirement is that an audience understand it instantly from outside, which is close to the opposite of the requirement that an operator use it all day.

Relevance

Two other technologies in the film are around today.

The retinal-scanning advertising, in which billboards address Anderton by name as he walks past, is now the ordinary condition of the web, achieved through different mechanisms and without the eyes.

Precrime itself is the more serious case. Predictive policing systems are in operational use, and the structural problem the film identifies is the one they have: the system's authority depends on its outputs being treated as certain, so the dissenting result has to be suppressed rather than published. A model that reports its own uncertainty cannot be used to arrest anyone. The UK has a "Prevent" department related to this.

Related Reading

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Neuromancer
• Keiichi Matsuda
• Designing Interactions
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Douglas Engelbart
• Mother of All Demos
• User experience design
• Low Resolution Indicators
• Architectural Intelligence
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
• The Cyborg's Dilemma - Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments
• Simulacra and Simulation
• Society of the Spectacle
• Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940
• The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It
• Anthropology Through Science Fiction
• Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts