Why do robots need a HUD?

It does not make sense at all, what is the point and need for all the info being displayed?



Why is the data layered graphically over the video feed versus just being processed as metadata separately. Layering the targeting data over the video is an unnecessary process because the cyborg already knows the information, by definition. Not to mention the loss of fidelity.

What is the point in displaying the model of the bike on the screen for the Terminator to read if it's CPU can simply acquire the information and process it without all visual overlay, like humans... when you see a harley, you already know what it is, no need for anything to be displayed.

HUDs like Terminator, Robocop and other cyborgs have in movies are completely unreal and unpractical.

Well you could argue that is a kind of debug interface for human technicans.
But if you try to think of everything that doesn't make sense in scfi films you'll have alot of work to do

The Terminator was a cyborg, not a robot. Half-human, half-robot. Robocop was also a cyborg. The HUD was good theatrics IMO.

When I first read your title I thought you were asking why robots need a hug lol! Thats a whole different answer.

I would assume a HUD is used to relay what any artificial life is seeing, so that its thought process can be analyzed when it returns home for oil and lugnuts....

reply to post by CyberGhost


It is only for the convenience of the story. I don't think many people would understand metadata, and it would look more boring than anything.

It's like wondering why C-3PO and R2-D2 aren't "modeming" ( or wifiing? ) each other when exchanging info, instead of relying on mechanical speech. Some scenes between the two would not have been as memorable!

Plus, the living characters having to wait for the jammed printer to give the answer of the robot while being fired at would have become redundant and unrealistic...

I would say just so there can be a record of the actions taking by cyborg/android 's decisions with data supplied to an overseeing force ... i.e. a technician

It's a movie special effect. Movies make up all kinds of stuff. Sci-fi movies have all kinds of special effects to make the movies more fun to watch for a majority of paying movie goers that would never happen in real life. From star wars space battles where the enemy ships make all kinds of sounds in space and massive space explosion sound effects to asteroids about to hit the earth but are split apart at the last minute from some oil rig guy sent up on a rigged up space shuttle. There's a lot more fantasy than science in many movies.

It's a movie made for a human audience, so the filmmakers (James Cameron in this case) will use visual cues and images that make sense to us as a way to express a complicated idea very quickly.

Sure, the robot does not need to see floating words over its field view to make sense of what it is seeing, but we, as an audience, do need to see these things.

In film and other forms of fiction this is known as the "willing suspension of disbelief." In theater the audience engages in this all the time. By its very nature, a stage play is absurd, with people acting out stories on a riser with an audience watching them. Plus, you have people making vocal pronouncements of their internal thoughts to the audience (asides and soliloquies), yet the audience is supposed to accept that what they are hearing are the internal thought processes of the characters.

This is no different, really, we are just being given a kind of visual soliloquy of the internal thought process of a robot.

I would HUG a robot. they need love to.
have you seen what the japonese build?
Aiko fembot, real japan.
metroplis robot!
battlestar galactica.
Galatea,
so many sexy robots.
not like the old blow up dolls.

Thanks for the answers guys,

I wonder, how would(will) a real cyborg work and analyze information? through sensors, camera, etc?

Yeah, it's a scifi movie and spinoff TV show and shouldn't be taken as representational of how anything really works.

reply to post by CyberGhost


cyborg vision today tends to map the pixels picked up by the camera to an electrode grid, which is placed in the brain, on the retina, or even on the tongue or back. The brain's plasticity eventually maps the grid's output to the visual cortex of the brain, and the "cyborg" eventually learns to decipher the signal into crude vision. It's far from common, but it's real.

Real robots with computer vision never really
"see" things per se. They receive information from their cameras as a stream of numbers, and processes it with what basically amounts to math. There's a lot of pattern recognition they have to go through, but it's probably not quite the same as how we do it.

I think in that movie the AI of the unit has extremely good image recognition subroutines and a huge database of things to help it make decisions. And this database would be encoded to show each item as to it's value for helping with a mission or goa (just from watching the movies) l. I "hope" the military hasn't yet made anything that sophisticated though!! we would be in even deeper trouble than now, although right now we seem to be so close to the end it might not matter
Just thinking about this and the lure of what it would mean personally for someone to overcome the biggest hurdles in making it a reality, I am sure there are people in military and it's contractors working on it right now... pretty cool stuff when you really start thinking about it.

The HUD could be a way for it to assign values to the input recieved visually and auditory, etc...

[edit on 2-6-2010 by alienreality]