Minority Report tech

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Minority Report tech

Post by jaeger115 »

A few days ago, I saw the movie Minority Report. I wonder if any of the high-tech in this movie is practical, so I'll list them and wait for your feedback. :wink:

Glass consoles: At the start, Chief John Anderton reviews a future murder on a huge glass wall that wraps around the room. He interfaces with the wall with a pair of gloves with blue lights on the fingertips.

Maglev: We saw a whole highway of maglev cars in DC. These cars can climb up, down, and sideways on the side of an apartment building, provided the maglev trackage is there.

Precognitives: These three kids can predict future murders. The Precrime unit uses these gifted individuals to pinpoint the time, place and individuals involved.

Aerial vehicle: The Precrime division uses a few of these to transport cops rapidly around the city. I saw no rotating blades, so it obviously must be a hovercraft. Yet the design of the vehicle doesn't look aerodynamic.

Spyders: Tiny drones with a scanning pod and a few flexible legs attached. They proved to be quite intelligent, since one of them held up a floor panel for the others to enter. Their hearing is extremely sensitive, as one of them actually detected a bubble bursting on the water in which Anderton was hiding. Their legs are very flexible, yet strong. Is that possible?

Face-altering chem: When preparing to reenter Precrime and steal one of the precogs, Anderton used a face-altering chem to make himself look like an old man. It wore off after a half-hour.

Eye-scanner: We already have this tech, so it's a no-brainer.
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Post by DPDarkPrimus »

The precogs weren't created with technology, they were a fluke of nature, so I don't think that they should be included on the list.
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Post by kojikun »

The consoles are easy. We already have working on Flexible Organic LED screens that can be printed on plastic and light up on their own and bend like a normal sheet of thin plastic. Put that on a custom molded plastic "screen" and wham, there you go. Better then glass cause it wont shatter. The fingertip controls are no problem at all. We already have relatively cheap motion tracking (and optical mice are the cheapest form) that require no control points (such as ping pong balls glued to your finger tips) and and with dedicated signal sources like the gloves Anderton wore it would be even easier. The interface is little more then motion tracking with Mozilla-style controls.

The Maglev cars are theoretically possible, though youd need some very strong magnets to ensure that if the conrol magnets failed while the vehicle is verticle, the car will stick to the road. I imagine that you could use something where the car has to fight AGAINST these magnets just to stay up and if the support magnets shut off the car would automatically loose support and clamp to the road.

Precognition violates the laws of causality, tho some research is showing possible drug induced precognition. It's also theorized that time is constant and that it is merely our perception of where we are in time that changes rather then where we actually are, as if the future has already happened. But that would still violate causality because if you change the future, it no longer exists.

The aerial vehicle that the Precrime division used sounded like it had a few jet turbines in it. It might have used more powerful versions of VTOL jet engines from craft like the Harrier jump jet. Better fuel would also allow for compactness.

The spiders might be possible. Remember, if Moores law continues and processors double in speed every 18 months, by 2050 computers will move at 3,221,225,472 GHz. Now, obviously this is absurd, as that ranges well past XRay frequencies. But thats not to say that you wont have microchips that run at 20GHz that are so small that 10 could be integrated into a single Spider-sized robot giving it plenty of brain power. Thats also assuming that the spiders use localized intelligence as opposed to be remotely controlled by a nice full sized computer. Their bendy walking legs would be a challange, but not necessarilly out of the question.

Face altering chemicals are a totaly bullshit idea. Your flesh cannot move that much without oing permanent damage, and to become that fluid would require that you stick your head in a blender set to puree.

The eyescanner well, yeah. Old news.
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Post by kojikun »

--The precogs weren't created with technology, they were a fluke of nature, so I don't think that they should be included on the list.--

Actually if I'm not mistaken they were a side effect of drug testing on mentally impaired children.
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Post by Dahak »

Well, as for magnetic transportation:
Chins has finished the building of the Transrapid (developed by Thyssen) track in Shanghai. It's needs a track for the train to run on, but it's fricking fast (around 430km/h).
So one just had to make the leap from track to the tech seen in Minority report
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Post by kojikun »

Germany has had test trains for some time now, if im not mistaken. fully working systems are more an issue of money then technology, as anyone with big neodymium magnets can build a track and car.
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Post by Dahak »

kojikun wrote:Germany has had test trains for some time now, if im not mistaken. fully working systems are more an issue of money then technology, as anyone with big neodymium magnets can build a track and car.
We have some test tracks.
But the problem with a "real" track is that it costs money, and a special ig part are the Tree-huggers, who don't like the tracks and oppose the uilding of them...
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Re: Minority Report tech

Post by Sir Sirius »

jaeger115 wrote:Glass consoles: At the start, Chief John Anderton reviews a future murder on a huge glass wall that wraps around the room. He interfaces with the wall with a pair of gloves with blue lights on the fingertips.
Easy to build, but I don't see the advantage of such a system. It looks like a rather slow and physicaly excerting computer interphase.
jaeger115 wrote:Maglev: We saw a whole highway of maglev cars in DC. These cars can climb up, down, and sideways on the side of an apartment building, provided the maglev trackage is there.
Possible, but the system is simply to grandious and megalomaniacal, not to mention expensive, to be in widespread use just 50 years from now.

And then there was that stun gun thingy that didn't care about Newton's Third Law of Motion and the 'Sicksticks', i have no idea how they would work.
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Post by jaeger115 »

And then there was that stun gun thingy that didn't care about Newton's Third Law of Motion
The waves generated looked like sonic waves, but I've never seen sonic waves make themselves visible. It'd have to be an extremely powerful wave to do that. And wouldn't a wave that powerful also mess with the victim's insides?
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Post by Master of Ossus »

The "SickSticks" must work with some kind of a nervous reaction to something. I disliked the shotgun-type things that could send people flying without even a little recoil, though.
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Post by Dahak »

In the making-of, they said the cannons were using sonic waves.
And the sick-sticks some form of microwave radiation that induced some reflexes and made you vomit uncontrolably.
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Post by Atlan »

jaeger115 wrote:
And then there was that stun gun thingy that didn't care about Newton's Third Law of Motion
The waves generated looked like sonic waves, but I've never seen sonic waves make themselves visible. It'd have to be an extremely powerful wave to do that. And wouldn't a wave that powerful also mess with the victim's insides?
Maybe it was some kind of blast of compressed air. OTOH, that would mean that you would get recoil. Hm, tough one...
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Post by jaeger115 »

And that part when John Anderton survived the making of his own Lexus! Could someone do that in real life? I doubt it :?
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Post by DPDarkPrimus »

kojikun wrote:--The precogs weren't created with technology, they were a fluke of nature, so I don't think that they should be included on the list.--

Actually if I'm not mistaken they were a side effect of drug testing on mentally impaired children.
Hmmm... well, even so, I don't think that we would be trying to create people with said precognative abilities on purpose, so I still think that they should be left off the list...
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Post by Sea Skimmer »

kojikun wrote:--The precogs weren't created with technology, they were a fluke of nature, so I don't think that they should be included on the list.--

Actually if I'm not mistaken they were a side effect of drug testing on mentally impaired children.
The children where the result of there mothers using some new illegal drug.
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Re: Minority Report tech

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jaeger115 wrote:Maglev: We saw a whole highway of maglev cars in DC. These cars can climb up, down, and sideways on the side of an apartment building, provided the maglev trackage is there.
This is just a maglev version of Personal Rapid Transit. Hypothetical designs exist already; all that's lacking are the money and political will to build a functioning system.

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Post by Admiral Valdemar »

Watched the DVD again the other day, love that film.

Anyway, the pre-cogs are a no go as for real science even if we have people who can seemingly predict bad incidents and so on, they were the only real bit of non-science and therefore fantasy in that film, everything else has been deemed practical in the future by a board of scientists and technicians etc.

The Spiders were obviously nanotech (the legs at least) and are nothing more than mobile retinal scanners. No problem other than power and size at the moment plus materials.

Maglev is real enough, but I doubt it will be anywhere near that diverse in D.C. even with American money in 50 years. Besides, hydrogen fuel cell cars seem better and everyone likes to drive themselves even if the track idea is more efficient.

The VTOL craft were nothing stupendous other than far superior fuel or engines, possibly gas turbine or electric ducted fan so as to avoid all that heat and additionaly thrust in an urban environment. Short distance though.

See through screens, no problem, have them now really. Swatch and Nokia are working on them, the film showed Burgess using a Nokia screen and the ear phone is doable but too small to be practical. Phones are small enough now, they need not be smaller.

Lexus was an actual concept design and powered by fuel cells, but Anderton survived being in it during the production line due to character shields. It would look kinda crap if he died from having a pivoted car seat attached to his head.

Guns, the Beretta 9000S A\nderton has is real and nice. The sonic guns are being looked at as non-lethal weapons today along with masers. Soundwaves can be viewable if the distortion is great like heat haze on a hot day, but there would be recoil from a weapon that sent 70kg of man flying at least. No real reason for it to be impossible, maybe it fired a directed charge that made the shockwave thus nullifying some recoil? Ultra and infrasonic waves at certain frequencies and power can seriously fuck you up.

Sick sticks are easy enough, just hit a nerve. :)

Umm, what else...

Oh yeah, the storage devices were crystal it seemed, that is being developed now as solid state memory storage instead of discs they have now. No more noisy hard drives. The neural tap into the brain to input VR images and other senses or extract them seems a way off now, but I can't see any real reason for it to be unworkable.
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Post by SylasGaunt »

One nice thing about the PreCogs was that their vision went right out the window after you found out about it. Once you knew it was going to happen you had the option of changing the future... and I want a sickstick.
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Post by jaeger115 »

The VTOL craft were nothing stupendous other than far superior fuel or engines, possibly gas turbine or electric ducted fan so as to avoid all that heat and additionaly thrust in an urban environment. Short distance though.
Check my first post in this thread. My point was if the Precrime VTOL craft were aerodynamic.
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Post by kojikun »

--My point was if the Precrime VTOL craft were aerodynamic.--

Helicopters are unaerodynamic and wont fly if dropped save for minimal lift from autorotation. Brute force overcomes many obstacles.

And granted theyre no fixed wing gliders but they ARE aerodynamic in the sense that he air can easilly flow around their curved from. I'd be more worried about rear induced drag but i'd have to check what they look like to judge whether they're problematic.
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Post by kojikun »

Looking at this image, http://spielberg.dreamworksfansite.com/ ... 01_max.jpg, it's fair to say that while their shape is not perfectly aerodynamic, they are not prohibitively drag-inducing. Powerful enough engines could overcome the drag, and directed airflow, which doesnt seem out of the question for the design, could aid in reducing drag.

Luckily brute force is enough for the craft.
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Post by jaeger115 »

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Post by Gil Hamilton »

I loved Minority Report, though I only saw it once (I've also read the story, since I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan).
The control computer that Anderson was navigating with those gloves was more about artistic liscense than functionality, as well as a huge nod to Stanley Kubrick. Notice that when he's navigating through the pictures, there is a strong score of classical music. That is no accident, as it's classic Kubrick to have scenes to horrible violence to beautiful classical music. The whole scene was designed so it looked like Anderson was the conductor of a symphony of murder, right down to the hand motions. It was stunningly powerful for a film making perceptive, as was the whole movie.
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Post by kojikun »

--a symphony of murder--

Can I use that in an episode for my story? I'll give you credit..
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Post by Gil Hamilton »

Go ahead, it sounds like a fine title to me.
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