Such a cool find and lots of info. I love Adam's passion in these kind of videos. I'm on the other side of this and really don't dig LCARS
Really cool video by Adam Savage about Trek Design
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Such a cool find and lots of info. I love Adam's passion in these kind of videos. I'm on the other side of this and really don't dig LCARS
I like what LCARs represented, but I'm a bigger fan of ST:Prodigy's incarnation of evolved LCARS.
I never bought the whole thing of "the button you press is the right button" Unless the labels change on them for each user how would you know what you are pressing? I mean in universe that is.
The machine would have to read your mind and adjust the UI to what you want, at that point, it would be almost "Magical".
Well, that's for the actors' benefit. In-universe, the character would've customized their computers to their taste off-screen over the course of their career, and probably have a user-profile in the Starfleet database that knows how they like their settings and automatically gets applied whenever they start using a console anywhere. Likewise, the labels probably are different (and not just nonsense letters and numbers) in-universe, even the button layouts could change depending on who's operating it, that's just not something they can easily do on a TV show, especially when they're not even real screens they can change to show something else.
That seems to be what Mike Okuda was describing (in broad terms) which looked believable onscreen, IMHO.
The same thinking could be applied to TOS controls as well... it would explain how Scotty could easily reconfigure a switch on the Aux console to blow the impulse engines in "The Doomsday Machine"
I suspect its similar to how software works today.
It adapts itself to your usage and you can modify the layout to your own needs.
That said, consoles on SF ships can be tied to individual's own fingerprints, codes, etc.
So, when you 'log in' or take over the station from another user, the console immediately adapts to your own individual set up via simple touch.
Alternatively, it wouldn't be any different than a keyboard... if keys are all in a certain position, then after a bit of time, you don't have to look down to correctly input stuff - this is especially useful in cases of personalized UI).
Universal translators on the other hand adapt to the user, and there is no apparent delay in when people are speaking to hearing the translation... and the person can hear someone else/alien speaking in their own native language (even if they are NOT wearing comm-badges - so I suspect UT is wired into the ship's comms system so it can work without them - that's pretty much how it worked in the 23rd century, and then it was 'personalized' to the comm-badges in the 24th century while also retaining it as a ship-wide comms function which was delegated to a backup of sorts).
I suspect this works along the lines of reading the person's own brainwaves and projects the sounds directly to someone's ears (which is doable from a technological perspective even today)... and since this is done in real time, I suspect that the consoles on a ship could also scan the user's brain-wave patterns to maybe make it easer to work the console.
That could be also why SF security is considered by some to be easily circumvented.
The technology is intuitive so anyone can use it relatively easily because the UFP is an open society that accepts MANY different cultures (though I agree that they need to instigate measures in place to make it a lot more difficult for newcomers/spies to do the same - but we have seen this done too where people had limited access - so we know it CAN be done, its just that for drama reasons, SF ends up NOT doing it).
