Human and Computer Interaction in Wall-E

Wall-E is an animation movie released by Pixar back in 2008. I know this movie is not news material anymore. Thats why this article is intended not to review the movie. I’m trying to extract some information about interaction between human and computer represented in this movie. I bet everyone of you have watched this movie (if you haven't, go watch it now :P).

The first 35 minutes doesn’t involve any human thus we can’t find anything to relate with human and computer interaction. It’s just some funny little robot acting like human and having a crush to a cute probe.

The world is full of robots. So we see alot of robot to robot interaction (read: computer to computer interaction). The humans barely doing anything in their life. Nearly everything is aided by robot. Even they don’t have to walk to go virtually anywhere. Clearly i don’t want to look like that in my future. 

Actually, there are some interaction between human and computer. Mostly in the captain quarter. But don’t expect to see any sophisticated way for human to interact with computer here. After hundreds of years depending on smart devices aid, the human race is dumber. So the interaction needs to be simple and basic.

Navigation system

Because they can’t walk properly, they need some kind of flying bed to bring us wherever they need to go. But the path for their movement is fixed. Maybe they are too lazy to remember what way to go to the bathroom. The floor is integrated with some illuminated path controlled by computer to control our flying bed movement. They don’t need to remember the direction, just tell where they want to go and relax. I think this technology makes them more like robots than human. They can’t choose another path in the room because it’s not programmed to do it. Except if they fall from their flying bed but then they can’t walk with their own foot because they are such a big baby. They can’t even sit up on their own. Sadly, Wall-E as a robot can choose whatever path it wants.

Buttons

Again, because they are dumb and their thumb as big as bottle, the buttons had to be big, rounded, and has a simple symbol to represent it’s function. Even the captain still confused what button doing what.

Voice Recognition

Computers in this movie are heavily using voice recognition to interact with human. When the captain wake up from his sleep, just hearing him talking the bots immediately doing the morning routine for him. Such things like brushing his teeth, massage, etc. The captain just have to talk to the main computer to get any information and to give any command he want. Just with one clap when entering the captain’s office, all off the equipment turns on ready for use and it knows that the captain will want coffe first.

Conclusion

It’s not a bad thing that we use our advance in technology to make our life easier. But this movie tries to show us what will happen if we are too much relying on technology. This film also warn us about what will happen if we keep damaging nature with garbage. Maybe be we will see real sky scraper made from piles of garbage just like in the movie.