Right, kenobi_65! The main difference now is that the protagonists rely on “AI” to achieve exactly the same effect. No spoilers, but a certain Amazon Prime series that features a big guy is doing this exact thing this week. “Want to read the text on a document laying on a desk in a still photo taken 20 years ago? The document is only 20 or 30 pixels wide in the photo, but AI can do it!”
Ironically, in the days of analog video recording, we could often “frame average” to actually enhance video details so we could read license plates, identify car models, etc., for static objects. Modern video compression techniques make this much more difficult when resolution is roughly the same.
Exactly. AI / Super Resolution algorithms can do exactly this – enhance the resolution of an image. What makes it ironic for procedurals is that AI performs this task by literally inventing pixels that look “good enough”. It’s an evidence forger. If you apply it to a face, you’re going to get details from the faces you’ve trained it on.
My WAG there is that the show in-universe often indicated that those two characters were often on the same exact wavelength and could pull stuff like that off. Oddly when they later tried to date each other, after seeming to work well early on, her neuroses caused them to break up.
One that always bothers me is facial or fingerprint recognition, where you see hundreds of images per second flipping past on the monitor until it finds a match.
I have seen movies or television shows in which someone is transferring money (perhaps stolen) and the transfer takes several minutes as the on-screen amount counts up. It’s being portrayed as if it’s a file transfer.
The movie Weird Science used similar “'80s computers are just magic” logic.
As for tropes: the screen image being projected on the face of the viewer. To paraphrase Morbo from Futurama: monitors do not work that way!
Another trope: computer whiz types some simple commands and generates complex 3-D images. Star Trek: The Voyage Home (The One With the Whales) did this with Scotty typing the formula for transparent aluminum into an '80s Macintosh computer and we see complex atomic diagrams and other images being created.