Forget 'Iron Man's' fighting prowess, check out his computers

I saw Iron Man (cool Web site) on Sunday, joining the hordes who contributed to the $100 million dollar plus opening of the film. The movie was a blast so to speak, and Robert Downey Jr. was outstanding in the lead role. It has plenty of digital special effects and great production design, especially the futuristic computer usage scenarios.

(Credit: Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment)

Minority Report has some interesting computer usage scenarios, but Iron Man is far more sophisticated. It's difficult to describe the digital systems, but they are artificially intelligent (pass the Turing Test), and allow Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, to design, fabricate, and control very complex gear, with voice commands and hand movements, in matter of weeks, not decades or centuries.

There were some old-fashioned keyboards and command line screens along with advanced 3D user interfaces and heads up displays, but no Google searching, Twittering or iPhoning. The cars (Audi paid for the new R8 to have featured role in the movie) were very ordinary but fleet.

A note to movies goers: the jumbo popcorn with the free refill has been suspended due to the rising cost of corn and production of ethanol, at least at my theater.

See Metacritic for reviews of Iron Man.

[ewelch]

I liked the movie a lot, but the product placement was particularly egregious.

But those dual 30" Cinema Displays made me drool.

[tylersmyler]

Only 30" ?? I haven't seen the movie yet but seesh. They can can do anything they want in a futuristic movie. Why not 87" OLED crazyness..

[Orion Blastar]

Tony Stark uses Dell servers and Dell computers.

[hn20]

This is exactly what I thought: the most fantastic thing in the film was the AI of Tony Stark's computers. It's more difficult to build this kind of AI than the actual Iron Man suit...

This was a great piece of entertainment, Jon Favreau and the rest of the crew did an outstanding job - go see it.

[Mercury23]

His digital panoramic window in his bedroom was the first thing that got me. How it went from alarm clock to weather and other various information. I smiled real big and whispered to my g/f that I want one of those :) She has an Audi Quattro but thought the Audi product placement was a bit much, like every car you saw seemed to be an Audi. The Burger King part though I chuckled at.

I'd rather have that giant window that can generate information than the 30" cinema displays ;)

[Jacques_Auef]

I saw the movie and Tony Stark was using two Apple iMacs

[inachu]

The virtual home butler as far as I know from past videos on the internet is real.
http://www.opulentitems.com/Virtual-Butler_p_63-207.html

[crankarms]

What about the Tesla Roadster in Stark's fleet? That's way more advanced than an Audi.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/02/03/iron-man-tony-stark-gets-a-tesla-before-anyone-else-does-must-b/

[shlinder]

What was the keyboard used in the movie? It was divided and had touchpay like keys.