#devs 2020

The majority of the visual effects were created by DNEG in London which has a long history in dealing with Sc-Fi content with respect and tremendous visual fidelity. Films such as Inception and Interstellar have gained the company both Oscars and genuine respect from the science community.

Alex Garland, Devs

In some respects, one can think of a quantum computer today as being analogous to an analog computer from years ago. The cooling is key to reduce energy and thus vibration in the system. If a quantum computer is run for too long the processor heats up and the noise in the results increases. So sensitive is the computer to heat or vibration that at the $150 million Nanoscience Hub at Sydney University, scientists have to use stairs rather than the lifts because the quantum computer would feel the vibration of the lifts in the building and produce meaningless results. Thus in Devs, the quantum computer main lab space is depicted as a suspended hovering isolated block, inside a bunker style building. This art directed visual feature, like so many in Devs, had one foot in reality and another in fiction.

“That film was still in the back of everybody’s mind… I cannot recall whether the actual screenplay describes the cube as being a Menger Sponge or not? But certainly, I don’t think there was ever any discussion of it being anything else.” The horizontal midsection was built on a set in Manchester and DNEG extended it up and down digitally.  On the set, there was also a large trolly that could be pulled back and forth to provide the basis of the capsule that floats across the gap. “Everything above and below that was a very elaborate set extension. Because the lighting is changing the whole time, it was incredibly complicated to do,” explains Whitehurst. The only exception is the major capsule drop in the finale. “That crash is all CG because it had to be,” he explains. “Even for the fully CG shots, wherever we could, we’d get Rob (Hardy : DOP) to operate some sort of camera move to give us something to work with. In those rare cases where we couldn’t do that,” says Whitehurst. “I’ve known Rob long enough that I think I can do a recently good Rob Hardy impersonation of moving a CG camera around!” Hardy and Whitehurst, have both worked many times with Director Garland.

A ‘motto’ at the core of the enigma that is quantum reality, is that what we see when we look at the world is seeming very different from what reality is. Take an atom, the classical view most of us have is a planetary type system with an electron circling a central proton/neutron. Almost all art and graphical diagrams of atoms reinforce this simple representation when in reality it works as a quantum electron wave function, and the best we can do is predict a probability of seeing an electron somewhere with a particular velocity.  Superposition is a key aspect of quantum physics that states subatomic particles appear to exist in multiple different states simultaneously and not as the orbiting electron image you have in your head from High School, – which is a child-like stick figure compared to the actual complexity of atomic quantum mechanics. Superposition is the key to many new quantum algorithms.