Reality Filter, AR and VR Options

[Garrowolf]

What if instead of having AR and VR being completely seperate you have them as a continuum? Treat AR, VR, and eality Filter as all versions of the same thing.

At the bottom of the rung is small simple interfaces. They can be floating hologram looking menu systems. They give you the abiliy to access information and have a limited feedback system to allow you to push buttons they project.

Then next rung has full floating AR that uses your head as the center of a desktop. Basically it al floats around you and you can move your head some but notthat much before the whole thing moves with it. You can pull these windows around and mentally press some buttons.

The next rung is better integration with the physical world. You can anchor a window to a meatspace object as long as it has a RFID tag there. This way you can have an office++ in meatspace. You can also close your eyes and enter into VR to see a small office or a house with fairly good rendering. You can access a VR site and asign it to a door. Then you can walk through the door in a form of Virtual Projection (kind of like Astral Projection - like that? I just made it up! Virtual Projection (At least I think that I made it up)). You walk around while your meat body is coma like.

The next rung is good integration with the physical world. You can edit the world around you to look like some other place. You can give your house a window that looks like a real window, looking out onto the Mediterrianian ocean. You can change your walls. You can edit new objects that are VR that either cover up the physical or add features to the physical. You can feel these objects as different. The simsense is there adding to it's reality. People in VR can come over to your altered house (or your real one) and interact with you as if they were actually there. They would open the door. It would show that the door was open and provide the correct sounds as well. He could shake your hand and the simsense would provide that information as well.

You could either choose to Virtual Project or edit the world around you to still go to a VR site. You could have you bedroom work like a holodeck. You would just have your reality filter providing clues to keep you from hitting walls or furniture. It could scroll with you so that you could move through the VR site to places out of range of the size of your room. You look like you are walking straight through the room but you are actually pacing slowly back and forth wth the VR rotating around you. You tell it mentally that you want to make it to a certain chair so it will steer you to your own chair at the right moment.

The last level would be fully integrated. Your reality is fluid.

I was thinking that each of these steps would require a higher and higher system and response level. This way you can have low level commlinks that act much like AR PDAs. Then you have someone who is always making the world a rosy hue.

[Crusher Bob]

The problem here is that the limits on the interface are generally the user's ability to comprehend the data and the design of the interface that makes this harder or easier. Even the dirt cheap CPUs found in t-shirt care tags can probably put up all sorts up pretty pictures in post processor-gasm 2070.

[Serbitar]

Garrowolf: thats already the case. Sim-modules provide AR and VR. VR is just full AR with RAS override on.

Dont ask me how that fits to the rules, but thats the fluff.

[hobgoblin]

i would not say that AR is just VR with the RAS off, and i cant say i understand how you get that impression from the books. but then we have had a lot of those discussions lately. so many in fact that i some times wonder if we are reading the same book ;)

[Serbitar]

Effectively its just that.

[lorechaser]

[hobgoblin]

[hobgoblin]

[lorechaser]

[hobgoblin]

as in reaching for the AR book icon/ARO?

[mfb]

interfaces are probably customizable by the user. people who don't use computers often probably slave their icon's 'movement' to their gloves--when the user moves his hand, the icon moves his hand, so they look like blind retards. more advanced users slave most Matrix actions to finger movements. curling your right index finger downloads whatever your left index finger is pointing at. tapping your left index finger and thumb together logs you off. tiny, intuitive gestures.

DNI would work the same way. slow users (low skill, low-end gear) concentrate on moving in the direction they want to go, and their icon moves that way. faster users select a location by glancing at it, twitch their virtual fingers, and end up where they wanted to go.

[Garrowolf]

okay so I didn't really finish.

What I was trying to say was how about this as a new stat on your commlink? Basically give rules to the fluff.

I was thinking that if it had a rating it could be linked to response. It would show the difference in another way from one level of commlink to another. The cheap stuff would be a version of a PDA. A high level one would be like walking into a desktop.

[hobgoblin]

i just dont see the need for that...

[Garrowolf]

[cetiah]

[Garrowolf]

well I can see some sort of matrix score based on proxy actions you have taken. I can see what he is talking about. I'm just worried that it is leading away from regular shadowrunning. It would work well for NPC hacker information brokers though.

I already have reworked the concepts of response and system. Response is a combination of CPU and memory. It is the hardware limiter.

System is just a package deal OS. I don't use it as a limiter. It is basically the default rating for the common use programs and the firewall. It is just what it packaged with your commlink. That way the PC doesn't have to buy up a bunch of programs. They buy the System and raise a couple of programs that they use alot. You could have a System of 3 and a Firewall and Reality Filter of 5.

Response is the only limiter. You can have a program on your computer that has a higher rating then your response but it only works at your response level. If you are having to bridge through a repeater then the rating of the repeater's response becomes the limiter.

I like the idea of calling it an Interface rating.

[cetiah]

[Garrowolf]

Basically I think of system as just the stuff that comes with the OS. It's like windows. You could put more advanced programs on it then what it came with. The limiter was the hardware most of the time, not the software. People think that it is the software because they didnt find the right patch to get it to work most of the time.

This way it is simple to buy commlinks but people can fine tune what they want quickly.

[Spike]

The way I've seen it is more or less thusly:

AR requires some sort of display/interface technology to work. This can be wireless capable contact lenses (In teh RAW no less...) that read your eye movements coupled with voice recognition software and earbuds for sound replay. But you DO have that display/interface requirement.

VR requires a simrig in your commlink. Simrigs either require a trode set or a datajack to function, and the data flows too and from your brain.

I don't see this as an interpretation so much as what the damn manual says. Maybe I'm reading into it, maybe not. VR requires SIM, SIM requires a SIMsense interface... trodes/datajack. AR does not require/use SIMsense at all, completely different method of interfacing. the AR display could completely cover your reality with a reality filter, but it's a hollow illusion, take off your display set, or use a sense not covered (touch, say) and you won't feel plate armor or see knights... you'll touch and see the dirty real world without any ARO's or filters.

VR is essentially real, it's all in your head, but its real. Only by breaking the connection completely can you get out of it (vs just peeking around your VR display).

Obviously the difference between hot and cold VR is the level of signal strength and the number of filters between your brain and nasty Mr. black IC. Note that by purely fluffy descriptions, Hot Sim VR can fry your brain even without hostile IC attacking you (and probably represents a critical glitch). It's runnign sim without safety nets...




All of which might explain why I find these threads a little confusing.... :wobble:

[cetiah]

[Garrowolf]

Yes Spike I was talking about a CHANGE.

I think that the seperation between AR and VR is mostly artificial. If you make it a series of Interface levels then it makes more sense. I think by this point you could have alot more levels of simsense access then just hot, cold, and off. You would probably need one for the AR anyway to give you tactile feedback from touching the floating windows.

I was thinking that the types of interface could give you access to certain interface levels.

Take away the bonuses from VR. It shouldn't make you faster because it is a physical object to be manipulated. If anything it should keep it at the same rate as you normally do things.

I was thinking that the interface type could determine that. Basically have the passive types be things that allow you to see and maybe feel things as a receiver. Basically have something like the squid from Strange Days that sends but does not receive. Then the datajack becomes useful again because you reasonably would be faster if you could mentally access controls. Those controls would be faster as small floating icons and such instead of large virtual objects. Flashing menus and fast icon clusters would be much faster.

Besides there is no real reason for the VR to need simsense. It just is more convienent. You can do VR now (just low res). I see no reason that you can't have simsense in variable levels in AR as well. Why not have a menu for a resturant where you can taste things ahead of time? Why not have your commlink tell your body that you are warmer then it really is?

The game has packaged things together a certain way. I think that you can do alot of interesting things by seperating them.

[Spike]

Well, I can see that then. Rather than suggesting they ARE something which is contradicted by the RAW, you are advocating making a change to teh RAW to add levels of interesting ideas to your games. I'm down with that.

Recall that as it stands the only way to actually feel or smell anything in AR now is to buy very expensive and limited tactile feedback suits and rare and exotic (becuase you gotta be strange to do it...) cyberware that accepts teh occasional ARO code for smells. The AVERAGE AR user doesn't feel the icon's he moves around.

The reason for the seperateing the AR/VR thing is that according to the book, everyone uses AR to some extent all day long. You don't see billboards and roadsigns and advertisements, you see ARO's. Go to a 'bookstore' and the books are flat black boxes with no information on them, its all in the AR interface everyone uses from RFID tags. You don't talk to your buddy, you chat with him via AR, you don't flirt with that hot chixxor, you check out her AR profile and send a compatabilty check. People aren't going to have it downloaded into their brains be default.... maybe some would like it, but others would refuse to make that leap. Simsense is still 'dangerous' technology... and a technology that overrides your normal sensory input, making it daunting to use while attempting to use your real senses at the same time.

Now, altering sim to make it a continuum is not a bad idea for flavor reasons. Mechanically it wouldn't need to have an effect, unless you just like people being kacked by rogue IC through their cell phones as a feature of daily life. Remember in Strange Days the 'Sim' technology was fairly safe, the closest we saw to an actual murder using it involved the bad guy monkeying with the hardware while the guy was 'jacked in' to override his ability to get out. Essentially he electrocuted the man by the special effect of burning out his brain from sensory overload...

[Garrowolf]

I don't think that the average user needs to worry about IC in the first place. You can very easily have a safe rig that has safety limits in the hardware. You can feel like you have touched something but not that you have been stabbed. You can feel like you have smelled something but not a poison gas. You can probably taste things but not burn your tongue.

My point is that the setting has had decades to work on this technology. It is already been on the street for years. I think that it makes sense for it to have evolved. You maybe couldn't generate BTL signals with the normal rig. You would need a specialized or hacked rig to do that.

Simsense doesn't need to be seperated off. I think that it would add to advertising and all kinds of interesting things. I see things moving away from the seperation between VR and RL. We already are trying to go into escapism. WHy not make YOUR world a better place without actually doing good.

Sounds pretty cyberpunk to me.

[cetiah]

[bait]

AR is designed to allow the user to operate in both the matrix and the real world, in order to do this the matrix side of things is abstracted. ( Kinda of like the current gui interfaces of today.)

This is also why non-matrix initiative is used when running AR as your dealing with ARO and not full matrix objects.