Interaction Design Lessons from Oblivion — Deconstructing Vika’s Desktop
The first article in this series covered why you should even bother studying sci-fi interfaces in the first place. Now, we’ll deconstruct the different screens that make up Vika’s Desktop.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, SPOILERS ahead. It’s been out for 8 years now so don’t blame me if I give anything away.
To give you some context, Oblivion takes place 50 years after an alien invasion. The aliens, called “Scavs” have destroyed the moon which in turn caused massive damage to the earth.
The humans retaliated with nukes and the earth is now mostly contaminated and no longer habitable long term. So, most of humanity has left to colonize Titan.
These massive hydro-rigs were set up in the oceans to gather the earth’s seawater and convert it into energy. Since there are a few remaining scavs on earth causing trouble, the hydro-rigs and surrounding land are constantly patrolled by semi-autonomous drones.
So, Jack and Vika make up one of the teams that have stayed behind on Earth to make sure everything keeps running smoothly.
While Jack is on the ground every day maintaining the drones, Vika stays up in this Tower — above the clouds — 1000s of feet up in the air — and never sets foot on ground — ever.
She lives here, and works here.
The Tower itself looks out over the ocean and hydro-rigs, and Jack flies around in this small dragonfly-looking helicopter/jet hybrid, which is called a Bubbleship.
A spaceship, called the TET, is up in orbit and serves as command and control for the teams on the ground. Sally works on the TET as their main contact in Mission Control.
Vika uses this desktop to stay in contact with Sally, and to assist and monitor Jack as he repairs the drones on the ground.
Breaking it down into sections
In order to make the analysis process easier, I’ve broken the desktop up into five main sections or screens.
The two sections on the vertical side panel are the TET System Communications Status Feed, and the Weather and Wind Monitor.
And on the horizontal panel, we have the TETVision Map in the center with the Hydro-rig Status Feed to the left, and the Drone Status Feed to the right.
TET Communications Status
The TET communications status screen monitors the TET’s orbital position in relation to the Tower. Since Vika relies pretty heavily on the TET’s surveillance and communications capabilities, it’s important for her to know when the TET is going to be within range.
The large circle represents the earth, and the Tower Position is marked up at the top. The TET and the gradient it’s connected to, rotate to show when the tower is in range and how strong of a signal she’s getting.
This is actually one of the simplest interfaces in the film. The visualization is very easy to understand and allows for a quick glimpse of all of the information Vika needs without having to think about it.
One of the basic principles of User Experience Design is to create technology that allows anyone regardless of skill level to quickly and easily use the interface with as little mental processing power as possible.
Don’t make the user have to think about it.
Weather and Wind Monitor
The weather and wind monitor keeps Vika up to date on the weather systems and wind velocity vectors. That’s pretty important since the moon has been destroyed — resulting in weather that’s pretty unpredictable and severe.
This would have an effect on the Bubbleship and drone flight safety. Sadly, this screen doesn’t have any clear footage, so I wasn’t able to study it in any great detail.
Fortunately, we get a lot more screen time with the rest of the sections.
TETVision Map
This is the only screen we see her actually interacting with. It’s used for doing her face time with Sally and monitoring the Bubbleship, drones and Scav activity.
In addition to the map radar view, it has some pretty advanced capabilities.
She can use Jack’s DNA records to send the drones out in search of his bio trail when he’s abducted by the Scavs. She can detect and decode various types of signals, such as the Morse code message sent by Jack or the rogue signal sent out by the Scavs. And she can watch Jack remotely through the video feeds.
But down in the bottom right corner, there’s a feature that doesn’t really make sense — the tower rotation controls.
Why would that even be needed?
The main purpose of their mission is to make sure the hydro-rigs are secure and functioning properly — not getting an optimal view. You could argue that since Vika doesn’t get out much, she might want to have a change of scenery every now and then. But the tower is almost completely surrounded by windows as it is. So, what would really be the benefit of changing vantage points?
We can assume that it is there for a good reason that wasn’t covered in the film. Regardless of that reason, it does bring up a good lesson opportunity.
If you really have to fill up the empty space — which is another topic I’ll get to a little later — it seems that this space could be used for something more beneficial to Vika such as bike, hydro-rig and drone cam feeds.
Right now, she only has quick access to camera feeds for the TET and the Bubbleship and several encounters in the film prove that these would be a useful addition. This would give her quick access to more eyes on the ground, which would enable her to do her job of keeping Jack safe more effectively.
So when you’re adding elements to a screen, make sure that those elements are actually going to be useful and make sense where they are. Don’t just add stuff to the screen because it’s a cool feature or to fill in the empty spaces.
Hydro-rig Status Feed
This screen keeps Vika up to date on the water collection progress by showing the resource collection status for each of the rigs, and their position on the grid. The rest of it’s just fuidgetry.
The term “fuidget” is a combination of the term “FUI” — for Fictional User Interface — and “widget”. It’s a word that’s used to describe stuff that takes up space on a screen and looks cool, but doesn’t really do anything.
Drone Status Feed
And this final screen is the Drone Status Feed, which gives info on the drone’s vital statistics, deployment and fuel status. It also shows drone positioning along the perimeter as well as a larger diagnostics diagram of whichever drone Jack is working on.
And that’s it for the deconstruction. Now that I’ve walked you through the different screens that make up Vika’s Desktop, in the next article we’ll see what we can learn from their mistakes.
Please look forward to it.
This article is the second in a series, in which I recap some of the Interaction Design lessons I derived from the Sci-Fi film Oblivion for the nerdsourcing project launched a few years ago on scifiinterfaces.com — the companion site to the book “Make It So” by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff.
You can also check out the full project on their website.
