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?
@
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" =
"PARTIAL MATCH" =
"NO DATA" =
I've done the same for the "AWAITING DATA" screen as well:
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:
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:
No Margins at All:
(You can see here that the "Match" text has randomly flipped to Chinese this time.)
Comedy option: Margins set to 15px:
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!