Another Blade Runner thread: The Portable Voight-Kampff Scanner

I was going to offer my help with coding.. but it looks like I wouldn’t be of much help. Very fine work!

What would you say to 3D animations like a spinning LAPD sign on the start screen? Too much?
 
I was going to offer my help with coding.. but it looks like I wouldn’t be of much help. Very fine work!

What would you say to 3D animations like a spinning LAPD sign on the start screen? Too much?

Honestly... probably too much, yeah. Was cribbing a bit on the design from the images @Thain linked earlier in the thread, and the source material from Territory's (the studio that did the screen graphics) reel.

[video]vimeo.com/240920045[/video]



Might try adding that ghosting background effect, though, now that I have the ability to draw with some measure of transparency.
 
Last edited:
As I mentioned, I'm pulling the DNA helix graphic off the display. I feel like it's too sophisticated for the utilitarian nature of the device. I'm settling on filling the space with a larger DNA gel-electrophoresis-esque display and a line of numbers, the format of which I am somewhat cribbing from the ossuary analysis scene in BR2049, where the cameras are surveying the bones. I'm assuming these numbers are, perhaps, some kind of focal readouts for the camera settings.



Presently have it generating in DE XXX MM XXX DR X format, with the first two numbers being anywhere from one to three digits in length. I'm looking at possibly being able to flip the "DE" or "MM" text to chinese characters as a random event, though it'll depend on what I can fit in what spaces.

As an aside, I was trying to figure out what the Chinese charcters for "Blade Runner" might be. Sources seem to suggest that "銀翼殺手" is a good translation - Google Translate is kindly informing me that this can be interpreted to "SILVER WING KILLER". That's... close? I guess? Lol. Works on some levels? Wallace does say the Replicants are "angels in the service of humans", so I guess if you extend the Replicant = Angel expectation it's about as close to a literal translation as I can ask for.
 
Awesome job! I wish I had half the patience you do with electronics projects!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
How hard (or how much work) would it be to tailor make the user information page to each person buying a device from you?
If they sent a scan of a passport size picture.... and their required officer identification / name / fake address
Seems like it would be a option some people might pay a little extra for!


EDIT: I just re-read your post in more detail, (instead of simply drooling over the pictures), and see that you have already mentioned this.

Keep up the good work, i cant wait to see your final device!!!
 
How hard (or how much work) would it be to tailor make the user information page to each person buying a device from you?
If they sent a scan of a passport size picture.... and their required officer identification / name / fake address
Seems like it would be a option some people might pay a little extra for!


EDIT: I just re-read your post in more detail, (instead of simply drooling over the pictures), and see that you have already mentioned this.

Keep up the good work, i cant wait to see your final device!!!

Honestly, I'd love ideas for what information to put on that page by default.
 
For the 'user page' you could put something like 'Fingerprint Scan - Complete. User Acknowledged' or "Bladerunner DNA Confirmed" or something like that, as if the device scans the user so as not to be used if it were to get into someone else's hands.

Apologies if I didn't see it, but for the eyeball / dna page, were you thinking of adding different code serial numbers onto each eyeball graphic? Would be cool little detail to add.
 
This is some next-level prop R&D thread... Salivating with each update! Can’t wait to see the end result!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Honestly, I'd love ideas for what information to put on that page by default.

To be honest it looks good how you have it. Not every page on the device has to be full.
Although I am not sure if a police item would have the officers home address on display. Maybe their precinct instead.

if you were looking for something else, what about a warning "Unofficial/Unauthorized use of this device is a criminal offence" type thing?
 
just a few ideas regarding animations on the device:
My intention is that animations shouldn’t slow the handling of the device down. It’s supposed to be a function oriented device after all, not a consumer product.

- after the initial white flash, fade the boot screen up from black. The fading should be quite fast. Maybe pulse the glow of the LAPD icon to show activity while it’s “loading”.

- how about shutting the device off? I guess a animation like an old television could work quite well. Fill the screen with black, starting from top and bottom with a leading bright edge until it’s completely black. I guess a flash like on a TV would be too much.

- I think the transition between “waiting for scan data” and displaying the data is too abrupt. Maybe a short “computing” message with a small loading indicator before showing the data would help with that. As an alternative: loading indicators in each field and populate the data sequencially. Starting with the data we immediately have available, like the picture of the eye and the serial number. Ending with stuff like fingerprints and criminal records which are requested from the LAPD database. Again, this should not be too long as we can see him in the movie checking the results quite quickly after scanning (at least I remember it that way).

- while I’m talking about data from a database. Would it be a good idea to have a “connection” icon next to the battery bar? It could be flashing while we receive data (after a scan). We don’t know how data transmission in Blade runner works, so I don’t know if a cell tower icon would be appropriate for this application.
/edit: scratch that. I’ve just seen that you have a text saying “signal low” on your concept pictures.

- (not an animation..) you said in your video that it sometimes shows “redacted” as the date. Does this only happen for humans? Also, is the birthdate for humans in the same timeframe as for replicants? I thought replicants only live for 4 years? Maybe the dates for humans should be a few years further in the past, as we most certainly won’t scan small children (because, well, they are human anyway)

- I’m still not quite sure what a good transition between the boot screen and the actual data screen could look like. I guess a too sophisticated animation (like clearing the horizontal lines from the center, revealing the underlying screen) would be too much and not fit the aesthetics of the device.

A question regarding you 10px margin around everything: why? Won’t there be a black bezel around the screen anyway?

These are my ideas for now. I understand that some of these (especially the transitions between screens) are quite hard to achieve in code.

I hope I used the correct words for everything, English is not my first language :).

Loving your work so far!
 
Last edited:
For the 'user page' you could put something like 'Fingerprint Scan - Complete. User Acknowledged' or "Bladerunner DNA Confirmed" or something like that, as if the device scans the user so as not to be used if it were to get into someone else's hands.

Apologies if I didn't see it, but for the eyeball / dna page, were you thinking of adding different code serial numbers onto each eyeball graphic? Would be cool little detail to add.

No need to apologize. I don't blame anyone for not reading that stupid wall of text.

I like the idea of some kind of user authentication on the profile page. Honestly, if I had bought one of the ILI9341 screens with a touchpad, it would have been awesome to put a thumbprint image on the screen and have the user have to physically press that region with a finger before it displayed the information. Unfortunately, that would continue to drive up costs on the device, and I don't think they actually even make a version of this screen with a touch interface given its small size.

Edit: Yeah, just looked. I'm using the 2.2" version of the screen, which is pretty much the perfect size for the portable VK. The smallest ILI9341 screen that has any sort of touch capability is the 2.4" version, which is just a bit too big for me to get away with. Shame, would have been a neat thing to try.

I'd love to add serial numbers as an overlay onto the eyeball graphics, but the issue is one of width. I'd have to have a very small font to make that work, and once you get that small the font basically becomes unreadable. I could still do something like a 4x3 letter font, but some characters (E or R, for example) might not render as anything other than slightly blocky, letter-esque shapes. Maybe that'd be fine. I'll play with the idea.

To be honest it looks good how you have it. Not every page on the device has to be full.
Although I am not sure if a police item would have the officers home address on display. Maybe their precinct instead.

if you were looking for something else, what about a warning "Unofficial/Unauthorized use of this device is a criminal offence" type thing?

Yeah, the address thing was a dumb idea. I got excited about the fact that I started to find little bits of information about his address (Mobius 21, Apt. 111) and just ran with it, but it makes no sense for that kind of personal information to be on a device that could be stolen or lost.

The device usage warning is a good idea. I was also considering doing some kind of Voight-Kampff licensing text for the device itself, but I wasn't sure what that would actually look like (or if the idea of licensing would even still be a thing in BR2049, given that there was a full data wipe in 2022).

Precinct is a good idea. Is that what the "995" on Deckard's old badge and everything was? The precinct number of where he worked?

Bsz8n1A.png


@Borax, appreciate the write-up. I'm going to touch on some of the points you've raised!

just a few ideas regarding animations on the device:
My intention is that animations shouldn’t slow the handling of the device down. It’s supposed to be a function oriented device after all, not a consumer product.

Very much agree - the way I'm writing this is that at any point, the user should be able to interrupt whatever is going on by hitting the scan button.

- after the initial white flash, fade the boot screen up from black. The fading should be quite fast. Maybe pulse the glow of the LAPD icon to show activity while it’s “loading”.

The LAPD 'start' screen is intended to be, like, a maximum of one second. I could ham it up with more - a loading icon, pulsing LAPD logo, etc - but the device's usage in the film looks like it turns on fast. Flash, wind-up, ready. I'm picturing something a Blade Runner would want to be able to grab from a pocket and use in brisk fashion while a target is subdued.

how about shutting the device off? I guess a animation like an old television could work quite well. Fill the screen with black, starting from top and bottom with a leading bright edge until it’s completely black. I guess a flash like on a TV would be too much.

This is actually somewhat hard to do. The way I'm planning on having the device initialize is to have a contact or limit switch that is toggled when the slide fully extends. When the slide is pushed back 'shut', the switch will break contact, and the device will power off immediately. I can't 'buffer' this time without somehow maintaining power to the microcontroller, which raises separate issues - how would that be done? It might be possible to get a capacitor in the device that stores enough power to give the microcontroller a second's worth of juice to do a 'goodbye' animation sequence, but I haven't looked into any of that yet.

- I think the transition between “waiting for scan data” and displaying the data is too abrupt. Maybe a short “computing” message with a small loading indicator before showing the data would help with that. As an alternative: loading indicators in each field and populate the data sequencially. Starting with the data we immediately have available, like the picture of the eye and the serial number. Ending with stuff like fingerprints and criminal records which are requested from the LAPD database. Again, this should not be too long as we can see him in the movie checking the results quite quickly after scanning (at least I remember it that way).

I like this idea. If I can, I may write separate functions to draw the eye in, then draw some random crosshair patterns over the eye, have the analysis blips on the left side light up sequentially over a second or so, the GCAT DNA readout can have bars that get drawn in left-to-right, that kind of thing. Fingerprints being last is a good idea.

I have actually started implementing a bit of random variation already in the existing UI design. There's now a check that determines if it can find fingerprints at all for the target. Each fingerprint has a 10% chance of coming up "empty". If it finds one, but not the other, rather than "MATCH", it now will write "PARTIAL". In the unlikely event it finds no fingerprints (meaning, no image for left OR right), it'll display "NO DATA".

Also, I've implemented the ability for the UI to randomly flip into Chinese characters. I'm not super confident in my translations, but I'm trusting the internet (a mix of Google Translate and other sites) to get me a close approximation of what I mean to say.

"MATCH" =
QBHELwz.png


"PARTIAL MATCH" =
J0hdPzs.png


"NO DATA" =
RLD3BdM.png


I've done the same for the "AWAITING DATA" screen as well:
NfKTNzO.png


Also, today I learned: Chinese ellipsis is six periods instead of 3, in the middle of the line, in two groups of 3! How annoying is that!

while I’m talking about data from a database. Would it be a good idea to have a “connection” icon next to the battery bar? It could be flashing while we receive data (after a scan). We don’t know how data transmission in Blade runner works, so I don’t know if a cell tower icon would be appropriate for this application.
/edit: scratch that. I’ve just seen that you have a text saying “signal low” on your concept pictures.

I haven't actually implemented the 'signal low' thing yet. I have no idea how data transmission works either, but I actually think it's probably decent in the setting - K uses his camera drone to scan a live feed, Joshi can track his position to Las Vegas with her desk console... seems comparable to current 4G and GPS tech, at least. The drone thing might be some kind of ad-hoc local network, so maybe that doesn't count. I don't know.

He does receive a phone call from Joshi while on his apartment rooftop, though I don't know if any signal-related details are shown on the graphical elements at that point.

- (not an animation..) you said in your video that it sometimes shows “redacted” as the date. Does this only happen for humans? Also, is the birthdate for humans in the same timeframe as for replicants? I thought replicants only live for 4 years? Maybe the dates for humans should be a few years further in the past, as we most certainly won’t scan small children (because, well, they are human anyway)

The Replicants from the original Blade Runner had a 4-year lifespan. The newer ones don't, as far as I understand. The opening crawl of 2049 actually says "MANY OLDER MODEL REPLICANTS - NEXUS 8S WITH OPEN-ENDED LIFESPANS - SURVIVED", which might be why Officer K has to go hunting for them in the first place.

I have the year generation set to anywhere between 2017 and 2041. I can tweak that very easily, or make specific generation criteria for humans versus Replicants, but I didn't see much in the way of guidance for that. I want to at least have the Replicant age generation go into the 2040s, because the Nexus 9 series only started being manufactured from 2036 onwards (which we know thanks to the Nexus Dawn short film):


The Nexus 9s seem to be created as full adults, anyway, so nothing stops their incept dates from being all the way up to 2049.

- I’m still not quite sure what a good transition between the boot screen and the actual data screen could look like. I guess a too sophisticated animation (like clearing the horizontal lines from the center, revealing the underlying screen) would be too much and not fit the aesthetics of the device.

I can think of a few neat options for quick effects that can sweep over the screen, but yeah, I don't want to get too fancy with some of these things if only because I suspect the device would be very utilitarian.

A question regarding you 10px margin around everything: why? Won’t there be a black bezel around the screen anyway?

It was actually because I was initially working with the Pro Trinket. I wanted to do some random noise/hazing/color and light bleeding effects around the edges of the screen, and the Pro Trinket didn't have the memory to do those effects in space I was otherwise going to be drawing or writing data to. My first few efforts also involved trying to draw an exaggerated backlight bleed onto the screen around the edges of the UI margins, and I didn't want that crossing onto the rest of the display text because I was afraid I wouldn't have the memory to clear just the main UI areas if I did that. Also, I think my chief inspiration here is that LAPD screen again:

Mq9LZylm.jpg


Kinda liked the look of the frame-in-frame appearance. Thankfully, this is why the UI elements are almost all adjustable - all I have to do is change the one variable for the margins and the entire thing can stretch or shrink to fit whatever region on the screen I want it to. For example!

Margins set to 4px:
p94Gdvul.jpg


No Margins at All:
8BObYwpl.jpg

(You can see here that the "Match" text has randomly flipped to Chinese this time.)

Comedy option: Margins set to 15px:
OAJqQ9yl.jpg


I may broaden it back out - I actually think the 4px option looks OK. If I do that, I'll need to adjust that middle vertical 'gutter' width a little bit to be more visually pleasing, but that shouldn't be too hard.

These are my ideas for now. I understand that some of these (especially the transitions between screens) are quite hard to achieve in code.

I hope I used the correct words for everything, English is not my first language :).

Loving your work so far!

Seriously grateful for the thoughtful input, it helps a lot!
 

Attachments

  • Bsz8n1A.png
    Bsz8n1A.png
    232 KB · Views: 211
  • QBHELwz.png
    QBHELwz.png
    209 bytes · Views: 151
  • J0hdPzs.png
    J0hdPzs.png
    186 bytes · Views: 140
  • RLD3BdM.png
    RLD3BdM.png
    362 bytes · Views: 166
  • NfKTNzO.png
    NfKTNzO.png
    425 bytes · Views: 130
  • Mq9LZylm.jpg
    Mq9LZylm.jpg
    14 KB · Views: 174
  • 8BObYwpl.jpg
    8BObYwpl.jpg
    39.3 KB · Views: 136
  • p94Gdvul.jpg
    p94Gdvul.jpg
    37.8 KB · Views: 142
  • OAJqQ9yl.jpg
    OAJqQ9yl.jpg
    34.8 KB · Views: 165
Last edited by a moderator:
The "995" is the equivalent to "911."

Is this a "This was how it was in LA in the 80s" thing, or something else? Either way, that's good trivia. I guess I'm too young to realize otherwise - the original movie's five years older than I am.

I have gone ahead and tweaked the UI to have 4px margins. I feel like it's the best blend of backlight bleed and readable.

Anyway, this is what I'm kicking around for the profile screen at this point:

d1apo3L.png


I am not 100% confident in the foreign language translations of "BLADE RUNNER", but I'm pretty close. Actually, let me put it this way: The top line is Japanese, and I'm 100% sure of that, because I found a movie poster for BR2049 with that on there and Google Translate confirms it. The Chinese is a bit less certain.

A slightly different take:

ktL17tY.png



ULfC73a.png


I know Deckard / Gaff are old and retired by 2049, but whatever, this is for the fun of it.

Edit:
BR12819 pointed me at a better image for Deckard and I think I agree. Thanks, buddy!

nIErVL1l.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Is this a "This was how it was in LA in the 80s" thing, or something else? Either way, that's good trivia. I guess I'm too young to realize otherwise - the original movie's five years older than I am.

I have gone ahead and tweaked the UI to have 4px margins. I feel like it's the best blend of backlight bleed and readable.

Anyway, this is what I'm kicking around for the profile screen at this point:

[url]http://i.imgur.com/d1apo3L.png[/url]

I am not 100% confident in the foreign language translations of "BLADE RUNNER", but I'm pretty close. Actually, let me put it this way: The top line is Japanese, and I'm 100% sure of that, because I found a movie poster for BR2049 with that on there and Google Translate confirms it. The Chinese is a bit less certain.

I have the most minor of quibbles. I would put the word ‘identify’ before ‘detain’. So that the verbs progress in... severity. ;-)
 
Is this a "This was how it was in LA in the 80s" thing, or something else? Either way, that's good trivia. I guess I'm too young to realize otherwise - the original movie's five years older than I am.

It’s a “This is how it was in 2019 LA,” thing. ;-)
 
This thread is more than 4 years old.

Your message may be considered spam for the following reasons:

  1. This thread hasn't been active in some time. A new post in this thread might not contribute constructively to this discussion after so long.
If you wish to reply despite these issues, check the box below before replying.
Be aware that malicious compliance may result in more severe penalties.
Back
Top