Great piece, but sadly nothing to do with lightsabers... which is what I was expecting. Clickbait... *grumble*
PAH! Four decades of Star Wars: No lightsabers, no palm-sized video calls
When Lucasfilm recently unveiled its tribute reelto the late Carrie Fisher, one of the most memorable monologues in cinema sat right in its center. “General Kenobi. Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars... Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire...” Reading those words, we can see the …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 11:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
SW was never about our future.
It doesn't happen in our future. It's another time, in another corner of the Universe. It was never designed to understand how our world could evolve. It was cunningly set in a different world, with different rules albeit, cunningly again, a lot was taken from Earth history and mythology, from King Arthur to the Nazi "empire", to be easily recognizable, and palatable. It's Good vs Evil, among appealing and improbable vehicles and weapons.
It was never Star Trek.
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Thursday 25th May 2017 02:18 GMT F111F
Re: SW was never about our future.
I still think Kate was sleeping with her cameraman...about the only way she could get video from a hotel room window of the USAF F-111s flying overhead in the attack on Libya, and comment on it at the same time...not to judge, mind you, it was a neat bit of reporting.
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 14:43 GMT DropBear
"I would pay money to see any of those"
Well isn't it your lucky day... Behold Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress - it's what Star Wars was based on anyway...
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 12:05 GMT Tony Haines
future displays are rubbish
Currently, we have displays which are nice and big and clear, with a decent gamut, and in many cases almost free of visual artefacts.
Why is it that practically every display in the future is defective in some way, being blurry or with poor colour rendition, or translucent? Do future-people really care so much more about 3d representation than image quality?
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 17:06 GMT Toltec
Re: future displays are rubbish
"Do future-people really care so much more about 3d representation than image quality?"
Well people now seem to care more about the number of pixels than how good the picture actually looks, it killed plasma displays which are arguably better than anything produced now. AFAIK a 4K plasma could not meet the EU power requirements to prevent climate change so they just died a death.
OLED tvs do look pretty good though.
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 12:29 GMT Pascal Monett
"..how long would it take to post-process her message?"
How can we possibly answer that question when we have no idea of the processing ability of R2 ? Or of any other droid, for that matter ?
C3PO is capable of recognizing a face in the same timeframe a human can, something that our sprawling computer installations are just starting to become able to do and certainly not within the confines of a humanoid robot frame for which facial recognition is but a tiny percentage of its duties.
I disapprove of these throwaway comparisons that acknowledge that some sci-fi universe has robots and other sci-fi tech, then proceeds to draw computing comparisons that assume the same amount of processing power we have.
Even Star Trek's ship computer has far greater processing power than we have today, because it can understand when its crew is not actually giving it orders. Siri still has a ways to go on that front.
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 20:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "..how long would it take to post-process her message?"
Well, the TOS computer was still pretty primitive. You had to address it as "computer", and it always replied "working". I guess that made sense to the writers given how the mainframes of the day operated!
What is frankly ridiculous about Star Trek is that they have all this fantastic tech centuries ahead of ours (if not more, transporters will never happen) and then computers that are shittier than the ones today. Seriously, you need a helmsman to steer "evasive pattern beta nine"? Or to "lay in a course"? The computer should be flying the ship, firing weapons, and doing pretty much everything if you can have FTL travel and transporters!
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 12:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
"These “holograms” [..] are nothing of the sort. The only thing “holograms” have in common with holography is that both generate a three-dimensional representation."
This is correct; but at the same time, is the 3D projection ever *actually* referred to as a "hologram" (or in any way that implies this) in the film itself anyway?
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 14:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sorry, it's a turkey
Props to George Lucas for pulling it off, but I just rewatched A New Hope, and it is a stinker. Not at all the exciting classic I saw in 1977 aged 7. Go on, stream it now and watch it, I'll wait.
....
You see? Laughable plot. Feeble script. Drippy Luke Skywalker. I was beginning to suspect that the destruction of Alderon and the Death Star was a scriptwriter's plot device to ensure they wouldn't be called back to work on any more of this junk. Didn't turn out so well for them, sadly.
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Wednesday 24th May 2017 17:49 GMT Stevie
Bah!
"We need to be very careful of a confusion of terms."
We do indeed. 25 years ago the US release was of a film called "Star Wars".
That's it. No subtitle. No "Part IV".
The numbering and subtitling came later, when the gate was enough to get funding for The Empire Strikes Back. I well remember a collective (and loud) "You wot?" in a Birmingham (UK) cinema when the titles for that claimed it was "Part V".
My American wife argued this point with me for years until AMC showed an original print about five years ago, along with unredacted opening credits.
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Thursday 25th May 2017 10:38 GMT Simon Harris
"The media pictures looked like a hologram. What was that technology?"
It was done by Musion 3D - possibly a modern take on Pepper's Ghost.
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Friday 26th May 2017 21:20 GMT illiad
yes the meedya invent new meanings for words that are not 'fancy' enough... 'projection' is such a boring word...
notice the large frame at 45 % angle, that you project upon..
http://www.musion3d.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/freshizer/0d16002ee3e6c88b1ba3aad341786572_Eyeliner_Black-Eyed-Peas-61-1100-c@2x.jpg
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Friday 2nd June 2017 19:20 GMT E 2
Perhaps off topic
Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy/sextet, which must be considered an important work of SciFi, posited a future society with remote control precision flight robots, interstellar and 'lasguns' that could cut through anything, invisible shields, yet the hoi poloi lived a distinctly medieval life in terms of their tech.