Why do cyborgs and robots in movies have a HUD?

[Death Mage]

What's with movies involving cyborgs etc. always showing a HUD from the robot's POV? It seems counter productive to me. I mean, we don't have a HUD, and for good reason. We don't need one. All of our processing is done internally. If you look at a car going down the street, you don't see wirefram come across it to analyze it's structure to tell you "That's a '73 Camaro". You do all of that internally, but it works the same way. You also don't have a display of yourself to indicate damage etc. You just feel it and know where it is. You also don't need any text flashing in your vision, blocking things, to tell you that you're in danger, or whatnot. It's all in your head.

It seems counter-productive to block one's view with unnecessary information displays. I can see a reason to have one for output displays, but there's no need for a HUD blocking your own vision. (Similirarly having one in video games, where you can't feel the information yourself, is necessary.) Enhancements are another story. Magnification, light amplification, thermal vision, even looking through objects in any way possable, these are all things that a cyborg/robot could use to an advantage.

Any thoughts? Have I gone through this rant before? It's an old complaint of mine that's been brought up by the movie I'm watching.

[MacadamiamaN]

It's used for debugging, so a programmer can see what's going on in the robot's mind as he perceives things and analyzes them.

Though I have noticed that most of it is usually just silly bars and other little things going back and forth.

[Antrax]

How do you suppose the viewers will know what the cyborg is seeing, or even that they're viewing this through his eyes?
Antrax

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"If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love." -Victor Mancini, "Choke"

[Death Mage]

Now you see, MacNut, that would be output, which is a different story from the normal view. There's no need for a HUD in a normal view, but for the output for debugging it's acceptable.

[MacadamiamaN]

nah, budget restraints warrant most robot manufacturers to cut corners, i.e.. the output plug. So scientists and programmers are, in most occasions, forced to use the robo-camera (a small camera integrated into the robots eyes - what you see in the movie)

[Zag]

It makes sense for a Cyborg to have a heads-up display. Just because we have made a brain-to-exterior connection for the human to control external devices doesn't mean that we have a direct input of data, which is a lot harder technically. Presumably the bulk of information still comes into the human brain through its eyes.

For a robot, it's reasonable to assume that what the viewer is seeing is just a metaphor for what's going on in its "brain". For instance, in detective shows (regular humans) they often have us looking through the eyes of the uber detective as looks at a room, and our "vision" zooms in on some critical detail that turns out to be a clue. They aren't actually saying that he has telescopic vision, they are just saying that his mind is so adept at noticing the one detail out of place that he has mentally zoomed in on it. I think that we all understand this in that case, and there's no reason not to think that the through-the-robot's-eyes view is similarly analogous, not literal.

[The Ragin' South Asian]

BOOM! IN YO FACE! I bet you thought you were safe on this one, DM.

[Suspence]

It took 8 years to finally resolve the issue.

I wonder what cyborg movie DM was watching in July 2003. I, Robot was 2004. Maybe T3?
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[Zag]

[Death Mage]

Well, let's see, the "flashing text" bit probably refers to Death Machine, a horrible B movie which had Brad Dourif in it. It could have been that one. It couldn't have been T3. It was in theaters then, and I didn't watch it until DVD. So it probably was Death Machine that brought up this old annoyance of mine.

Something that still annoys me, I might add. And I can see Zag's argument. It works for some cases (the directives appearing "on screen" for Robocop, for example). But most HUDs we see aren't that kind of data. Take Terminator as an example. When we see through the terminator's eyes, we get the red screen (dunno why they would cut out color like that, maybe for low-light vision, but it hampers them the rest of the time), and text flashing on screen, wire-frames, etc.

And even if it makes sense for the film to have such a display, to let us know that the cyborg's mind is, indeed, processing information (acceptable, I guess), it wouldn't fit that the cyborg itself would. I mean, it is far, far less efficient to have the information routed to your screen where you then have to read it - which is being displayed on your freaking vision so it's not like you can glance down at it either - instead of just having it transmitted directly to you.

Though PoV zooms like that are becoming less common for human views too. CSI, which was around when this thread started, has done a lot of that. And I never batted an eye at it there. But that's becuase it doesn't really look like they're implying that that's how the people see things, with information popping up in their vision, unlike the cyborg's HUD. (Honestly, when it's done that way, I actually like seeing it. It works.)

And yea, 8 years, I thought this conversation was long dead. But hey, 8-years later, a fresh set of eyes on an old discussion isn't always a bad thing.
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[Suspence]

Even better, an 8 year old discussion about an 18 year old movie.

First thing I thought of when I read this thread was the Albert Pujols "Machine" commercial. What do you think of the HUD in this one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY_N2ewiCsQ

[MNOWAX]

funny enough that same bot posted in the "mafia games " thread. I have since dealt with the issue, at least in that forum haha.
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MNOWAX

[Death Mage]

Hey, there are a lot of movies that shoe the HUD, so you can't say it's becuase of any one movie in particular that this conversation came up.

And the commercial was funny. Most of those Sportscenter ones are. Kinda proves that the HUD has become a stereotype more than anything else. A way to tell audiences "Hey look, you're looking through the eyes of a machine, since you're too stupid to figure it out if you don't hit you over the head with it!"
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[JDTAY]

Fun fact: First ever CGI in a movie was a robot HUD in Westworld, back in 1973. It only took eight hours to render each ten seconds of it.
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[wordcross]

What if the HUD was attached to a cloud-based databank? Then the information is not stored internally and it's possible that the " '73 Camaro" information is pertinent and useful to the comparatively more limited Robot "brain"

For instance, if I saw a '73 Camaro, I might know that it's a Camaro, but I certainly couldn't tell you the year. If that's important information for whatever I happen to be doing (e.g. writing an article about a classic car show), then a net-connected HUD for me would be fairly useful.
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[Death Mage]

That's a possibility for cyborgs. Organic organisms with enhancements. Maybe even something like Deus Ex. But for pure robots? Wouldn't it still be more efficient just having the information uploaded to their memory, then displayed somewhere they have to interpret?
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