I've been building an infiltrator type and have spent a couple of days trying to choose the best gear set.

Then last night I read the Ma'fan 'Life on the Run' in Runners Companion. She puts in contacts designed to mimic someone else's retinas.

I've looked long and hard for such a piece of gear. Have I missed something or did the author of that piece just make them up?

Likely they were made up. But they aren't unfeasible. Even today you can get contacts that change your iris color.

also i thought you could put any cyber eye enhancement in contacts so you can just get retnal duplication for the contacts and wa-law(phonics ar gud) you have the retna changing ontacts

You could probably just use the maglock passkey cost(not sure what it is off the top of my head, and expensive yea but its retinal duplication) per rating, bump up the avail. and then just use its rating against that of the scanner. I would not probably use any other mods since you cannot exactly use any stats to help out but then there ya go. Retinal copying contacts.


Then you could always have some sort of program that scans another persons eye and then copy's it over to the contacts since its basically just the color pattern its copying.

That was the intent, yes.

I can't find any rule to that effect.

The closest I can get is the application of standard Vision Enhancements to Cameras.

Just take the cost/aviability of contact lenses and add the one of the retinal duplication:
Cost
50 + (rating x 15'000 )

Aviability
6 + 16F = 22F

Flufwise those contacts can be explained as holografic screens.

Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I have no problems with dragons, metahumans, cyberwear or magic but I find the idea of retinal copying contact lenses too bizarre to accept.

I think it's because I can't get past the idea of any piece of security apparatus being fooled by something on the convex surface of the eye that is supposed to mimic an opaque, concave feature of the inside of the eye that the device expects to view through the pupil of the person facing it. I can think of ways of doing it but they all leave the person wearing the contacts functionally blind (because the fake retina is opaque and covers the pupil).

Any one got a piece of pseudoscientific gobbledeegook that can overcome my reservations?

Assuming the technology hasn't drastically changed between now and 2070, its all about optics. You could add blood vessels to the retinal image by interposing an enlarged superimage at a shorter focal length, but the problem I foresee is that your own retinal vessels would still be visible, confounding your attempts to fool the scanner.

Unless of coarse the contact has a feature where it goes opaque only when the scan takes place, which could work.

Hey, we've invented non reversing mirrors so why not?

I think you're right in that creating the image of the retina would probably not be a problem, even with the correction needed for the convex as opposed to concave surface and the shorter distance to the scanner. However I think that the issue of the scanner expecting to see a retina through a pupil is probably insurmountable. Since the contacts are on the surface of the eye I cannot think of a way to fool the scanner into thinking that it has just seen something through a hole a few millimetres across.

They would certainly make more sense for an Iris scan.

The image would not need to be limited to the size of the pupil. The scanner pans to achieve different angles. Besides the majority of the retina is not visible through the pupil straight on. The retinal vessels extend from the optic disk, which is medial to the central axis of the globe.

Better illustration here.