Jurassic Park, one of my favorite movies, has made its
reappearance in theaters with the 4th movie in the saga, called Jurassic
World. The movie is bigger (as is the park), and this is reflected in
the size of the control room. Yes, just as in the original, a lot of the
action in this sequel takes place in the control room. And come to
think of it, there are a lot of movies in which the control room plays a
starring part. Why? Because control rooms are just darn sexy places –
at least on the big screen!
Control rooms are quite handy environments for
scriptwriters. Showing the nerve center of an operation, where all of
the information comes together, gives the audience an overview of the
action as it is taking place. In this way, movies dealing with
disasters, space travel, or large-scale criminal pursuits explain the
action and drama from inside the control room. (For a nice overview, see
Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessle’s website ? these two designers / SF
enthusiasts have compiled a list of future technologies at: www.scifiinterfaces.com.)
Probably
the first control room I ever saw was the one in the movie WarGames
(1983) (which I saw as a kid), in which a young Matthew Broderick
accidentally hacks the US Army’s mainframe (yes, these things could
happen back in 1983). We don’t really see that many differences between
that control room and the one in Jurassic World (or The Martian, another
2015 control room-centered release). Yes, the CRT displays have been
replaced by LCD models with touch screens, and the large video wall was
hardly ‘seamless’ back then, but the actions performed by the staff are
very similar. The operators focus on their own part of the action, the
large display mainly shows CCTV footage and a map – and the supervisor
is still shouting ? trying to see more details on specific events as
soon as possible to increase his and the team’s understanding of the
situation. Only in The Hunger Games we see a different setup, with
operators sitting around a central hologram.
We don’t see any screen-sharing between operators – or between
different control rooms. We don’t see any interaction with mobile
devices. We don’t see much use of social media or other content provided
by commoners. All the things that are possible – and used ? in today’s
control rooms. So, in a way, reality has surpassed the imagination of
the Hollywood screenwriters: they can put a man on Mars, but they don’t
know how to integrate Twitter feeds in a control room.
Hollywood
has a number of conventions, dating from the 80s or so, that still come
back in a lot of movies: it takes about a minute to trace a phone call,
all telephone numbers start with 555, and laser guns have visible (and
quite slow-moving) beams. And apparently, the action in the control room
is among these myths. That’s why we kindly invite Hollywood to visit a
real-life control room – they’ll see that it’s even sexier in real life!
