The User Experience of Iron Man

Flying the Iron Man Suit

But what of the Iron Man suit’s more prosaic capabilities: the ability to fly, for instance? Here we see an evolution of the solo rocket flight that we’ve seen in many movies. The Rocketeer just had a throttle and a combined helmet and rudder, but Iron Man’s flight capability is much more sophisticated. His suit incorporates movable flight surfaces like those on modern fighters, as well as multiple jets on the hands and feet.

So, how might Iron Man control flight? Simple rules to prevent accidents could solve part of this problem. For example, if Tony were carrying a survivor from an exploded 747, triggering the hand jets would be messy to say the least. In flight, Tony expects to be able to have some degree of physical movement—for example, to twist and turn to avoid incoming debris or missiles, without getting thrown radically off course. So Jarvis or another subsystem of the suit could compensate by understanding that, for certain movements, it would be necessary to change power levels or other aspects of the suit’s configuration. I can imagine two broad scenarios for flying:

1. Tony knows where he wants to go and can hand over control to Jarvis to get there. His suit’s user interface would essentially be a 3D version of that for Google’s self-driving car. Such a user interface could operate using multiple, redundant information sources for navigation—the stars, GPS, and an altimeter—together with collision-avoidance software.
2. Tony’s flight path and actions are unpredictable, so he needs to have a high degree of control and maneuverability. For example, if Tony were engaged in an aerial dogfight—for instance, with alien invaders—he would need a very high level of suit control. Not only would he need to be able to fly the suit, but to fight as well. Solving this problem gets trickier. A voice interface could help with some aspects of it—“Jarvis, shoot any aliens in range!”—but would be wholly impractical for others. Imagine the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon occurring during a dogfight: “Jarvis! Shoot the big alien … thing … with the … thing!”

(I appreciate that Tony Stark is a witty genius who likely experiences fewer verbal stumbles than most of us do, but remember that he is also an alcoholic.)

So, what kind of user interface could we use? Perhaps the suit could respond to Tony’s own movements—in the same way a skydiver can exert limited control over his direction of movement. Imagine doing this to achieve high-speed acceleration away from or toward a threat, for instance. Fine control would be more problematic. Perhaps Tony could change direction by changing the relative position of his feet—for example, by raising up his right foot, he could initiate a turn to the left in a relatively intuitive way. He could manage movement in a different axis by changing the position of his head. Though identifying which of his movements were intentional would be problematic, so that chord keyboard might again be useful in this case.

Summary

The Iron Man suit needs a very, very flexible user interface. At present, if we were trying to recreate such a suit, there would be only limited options for controlling its user interface. And there would be many demands the user interface would have to handle: flight and fight being the most obvious, but also information retrieval and problem solving.

While such a suit’s having a single, very smart user would make solving this design problem simpler, there would still be major challenges, including the need for the user to be able to switch tasks quickly; to delegate some aspects of control, while taking more responsibility for others; and to use novel control techniques. But our ability to manage many of these challenges today is greater than you might expect. Now all we need is the suit…