Posted on Monday, September 17, 2012 by Allison Byers
When Doug Caldwell went to see the movie X-Men, he wasn't thinking about his day job. But what he saw would change his life ... and the way the U.S. military makes war.
In the movie, the heroes map out a potential battlefield in 3-D on a table made of pins, like the pin screens you can use to take an imprint of your face. Caldwell, who worked on topography for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, realized that such a dynamic, re-purposeable topographic display could be built and used to better model battlefields than the static relief maps the Army was using. Part of the future imagined in the movie would go on to become part of the future in reality.
There's a lesson here (several, in fact) that Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff use as the basis for their book, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, which goes on sale Sept. 17 from Rosenfeld Media.