So I was looking through Unwired and I came across the following.

Negator
Negator software seeks to “edit out” anything the user programs
in as “undesirable.” Perfect for eccentrics, people suffering
from certain phobias, or snobs who don’t like to be bothered by
the little people, Negator software will hide, mask, or blot out with
other AR sensory input whatever they wanted negated.

So this basically removes anything you see or hear that you don't want to see or here.
Put this ARE software in your sunglasses and voila you have Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.

Yup.

Er... Wait, doesn't this edit OUT things? Potentially including things that could kill you? What you can't see CAN hurt you, you know... I think I'm missing something here...

Awesome. Are there also clothes mods to add nutritients to your towel?

True, but what can't see you can't hurt you (as easily). Hack someone else's commlink, upload Negator to it and run it to hide yourself. When you're done, corrupt it and delete it before you log off.

That's evil. It also gives me ideas like editing out obstacles in a drivers path (or other cars for that matter). Works even better if the target is known to run their own copy of Negator then you just have to hack their link and change their Negator settings.

You're obviously no froop and don't know where your towel is.

Thank you.Just as long as the car is not driving itself. IIRC most people of the 2070's don't know how to drive, so the car does the driving itself.And a good reason to keep your Firewall and Analyze programs as up-to-date as possible.

Everyone knows how to drive (it's a defaultable skill). Few people have taken extensive courses in driving. The example for Rating 0 driving is "Basic operator’s license. Can get from here to there, but can’t handle driving in adverse conditions." (SR4A p. 119)

True enough. But many [meta]humans are lazy by nature. If a car can drive itself, and drive better than you, are you going to drive? Maybe, maybe not, but most are likely to let the car drive instead (knew a player who's character did just that, let his Tata Hotspur do all the driving).

True, I was just saying that they can, not that they will.

Rain is an adverse condition...

So are tons of other conditions that afflict people on a daily basis. So?

So, saying that a Skill 0 allows basic driving (except for adverse conditions, which, as you point out above, afflict people on a DAILY basis) is a little disengenuous when those conditions are very common. Basic Competence should include common Adverse Conditions like Darkness, and Rain, to name just two. If you cannot do so, then you are not basically competant by any definition that I know of. Though I agree that the Skill 0 indicates this in the book, the lack of ability for adverse conditions is a glaring one, that will crop up 90% of the time is places with bad weather (You know, like Seattle). So, A minimum skill 1 would be required in my book to be Basically Competant as a driver (As in Beginner, per the Book. Seasoned, to me, would indicate that they had at least gone through the Required Drivers courses and passed the tests, both written and practical. They will have at least driven in those adverse conditions that scare the Skill 0 character)... Anyone with a Skill 0 likely just lets the vehicle drive for them, and only drives when they absolutely have to.

To Me, an Untrained Driver is just that... Untrained. You do not get a Basic Operators License untrained in the US, and likely not in Europe either.

I feel as though, if I were wearing negators, and I was driving down the highway and there's a giant black spot in the middle of the road, that I would move to avoid said black spot. I don't think it would be the most effective method of killing someone. Perhaps if you suddenly popped up a massive billboard showing said censored data, so it blocked out his entire vision it could be dangerous, but at that point gridguide kicks in and guides you to a safe stop.

DON'T PANIC!

Take it up with the developers, not me.

Though my guess is that they'd say that you don't usually have to roll for minimal adverse conditions like night or rain, so rating 0 is still ok. Personaly, I don't put important NPCs behind the wheel without knowing their Reaction and Pilot skills. The unimportant ones? Who cares whether they have a 0 or a 1? Or even a 43.

Thing is, Negator doesn't put a "giant black spot" in the middle of anything. By its description, it uses AR sensory input to "edit out" whatever is unwanted. AROs are created to cover up what you don't want to see (that homeless beggar sitting at the corner is replaced by an ARO that looks like that exact corner but without the homeless beggar), sounds countered by other sounds to neutralize them, and such.

Programs like PhotoShop already have this kind of functionality, and though it might not be on par to obscure something perfectly, consider what 60 years of technological advances can bring about.

This is often very true, so no worries...

"Edit out" doesn't mean "makes invisible." It "hides, masks or blots out with other AR sensory input."
The corner isn't AR input, it's regular visual input. In addition, if the bum is in the way of the corner, neither you nor your software has any idea what that corner looks like when the bum is not there.
While one can edit visual software to whichever degree you wish, to do so in real time can't be done in Shadowrun.

If a skilled hacker with a maxed out Edit program can't do it, it's safe to assume a 100 nuyen program can't either.

Not the impression I got about the program, not only from reading its description but in at least one other thread somewhere way back. Don't know right off where, but in that one someone mentioned that there's an app for a smart phone that could do just that, take incoming video and overwrite an object with an image to conceal the presence of the object, nearly in real time (poster suggested it didn't do too well if you were moving really quickly). Certainly that in sixty years that kind of software is going to do nothing but improve.

Besides, you're comparing a program with a rather narrow application to one with a potentially Grand Canyon wide array of possibilities.

If the program was meant to remove unwanted objects, it would have said "remove."
Instead it says it hides, masks or blots it out with AR input. What is behind the image isn't Augmented Reality. It's just plain old reality. AR images don't look like real life images. More over, you don't have any input of the image when the unwanted isn't there. Your cybereyes only know what your cybereyes can see, not what is behind the undesired object, so it can't replace the unwanted image with input it doesn't have.

I'm sure that such a program might be created, but Negator isn't it. Negator does the black spot thing. I prefer to make that black spot a big old happy face, ala Lisa Simpson on drugs, but that's just me.

I don't think we can make any such assumption, given the state of technology. Both seem reasonable. Just use the version you prefer in your own games.

It can already be done of course, it won't show you what's really hiding behind something, but it can look pretty real in most situations.

It would seem to have some pretty significant in-game effects, so should probably be addressed somewhere.

Regardless, I can't imagine the devices are legal when driving (and if they are, then gridguide would override any idiots anyway). Every other day I see the 'Abortion is Sin' truck drive around the corner. Imagine how many cars that would wreck.

Most people can drive in rain with the same skill they do when it's dry. Tires are pretty advanced already these days to ignore 99% of the danger wet roads pose to driving.

Snow on the other hand, have you seen people drive in the snow? Everyone turns into an idiot once the first flakes fall.



The software has gotten faster since I first used it. It still fails (if there's not enough surrounding similar patches to copy from) as you can see in the second example (there's one frame where it hiccups and you see some black blobs). But it's really, really powerful, generally pretty good, and now decently fast. Another 60 years and it'll be faster, better, and will be able to pull swatches from previous frames¹ to match texture, pattern, and orientation as the camera moves.

¹Nuke already does this, but its also not trying to do the editing in real time. It also pulls swatches from future frames, as it will do a first pass over the video to locate the object, then a second pass to remove it.

Neat. I'd imagine it wouldn't work quite as well on less uniform backgrounds, but still very cool. And by SR times....

I'd imagine negator would have options to do this, or more simple 'censor bar' type stuff. You might for instance set it up to totally negate bums unless they happen to be right in the center of your view and within say 5m, in which case they would get some sort of AR type overlay to make them look less offensive, but still let you know they're just money grubbing wastes. (Not my opinion, just an idea of how someone might use it)

So yeah, I could totally see a hacker adding this to someone's glasses or cybereyes to make her team invisible (At least granting a -6 perception to notice them from the slight distortions they might cause)

The problem is that we clearly can't use current technology to extrapolate for SR technology. That world would be all sorts of different if so many of the things they thought were new in 2020 actually happened today. In some ways there's even been steps backwards. SR != The Real World, it never has. If a piece of software says it hides things with AR objects, that's what it does. And unless those AR objects are from an ultraviolet node they aren't going to look real.

That said, if you like it in your game, I'm not going to call the game police or demand a tribunal. I'll just abuse the hell out of it as best I can should I end up at your table.

Since when can AR objects not look real? And since when does 'remove an object' mean 'cover it up with something'? Well, you know, besides when you're told to clean your room

Just looked it up and the section I was thinking of was talking about VR. I return to my original statement: if you like it, do it.

Actually, the difference between normal VR and ultraviolet VR is not the look, it's the smell. VR is already advanced enough to mimic the real world, but it doesn't come with smells and tastes, and only a limited amount of touch.

Not according to the rulebook.

Do remember that the smaller the object you're dealing with (in this case, an AR overlay "covering" a person in a larger scene) where the texture that's being painted is taken from the scene you get much better results than if everything was created from scratch.

I live in Canada, I can confirm this. A LOT!

I'm sorry but you can use an edit program to edit things out of a video stream at real time.
If you have 5 people coming down the hall and you want to remove one of them from the video you can use what was in previous frames to create the missing video.
This is in fact done today's technology. The problem is that most home computer do not have the computing power to do this at real time.
60 years from that though, that could be a completely different story.

This.


Since it's inception. AR overlays images, data and Matrix feeds. Unless it's UV it can't be mistaken for something real. Even overlayed holo-projectors have a pretty easy threshold of 2 to see they aren't real.
Negator never says it "removes an object." That is nowhere in the description. It says it "hides, masks or blots out with AR."

While the ability of the Edit program is up to Gamemaster's discretion, hacking someone's sight in real time is something that has been stated cannot be done in Shadowrun. There are too many variables.
With a camera, you have a constant background with which to overlay or repeat. Easy as pie. With sight, people move too often and see to much to be able to edit everything out that quickly. Think of it like Editing requires a Simple Action and turning your head requires a Free action.

An easier way to put it is like putting a painting in front of a camera. The camera and anyone seeing through it won't be able to distinguish it from a feed. Putting a painting up in front of a person will not fool them, as their eyes are constantly darting and doing all that monkey brain stuff.
If you want to say a skilled hacker with a cool edit program can hack someone's eyes, that's your prerogative as a GM, but Negator can't do that.
Negator does what it says it does: blots out with AR sensory input.

yup, which is why I called negator the peril sensitive sunglasses.

It would be cool if it edited out things, but all it does is put stuff over top of it so you can't see it.
A hacker sitting there editing the feed before it hits the brain on the other hand...

It's all dicking around with the wording. To many people, 'hides' could mean 'edits out'. While the intent probably was black boxes (judging from the other wording), there's no reason to stay with that. The usual arguments of 2010 technology apply, notwithstanding the usual counterarguments. It's the future with unlimited processing power. Just go with what your group prefers.

Adobe Photoshop already has context sensitive delete.

You lasso an object you don't want, and Photoshop extrapolates a texture to cover up the hole from the surrounding pixels. Most of the time it's good enough that people can't tell anything was done.



-k

The same tactic and similar views were expressed here.

Correct. The algorithm has been around for years, too (the GIMP has a plugin that's older than Photoshop's implementation, for instance). It's very powerful, it's just not fast enough to work on video in real time. Yet.

However, the argument that people would not be permitted to operate a vehicle while wearing devices that aggressively censor their sensory input holds no matter how you cut it, as does the fact that gridguide would prevent a vehicle from crashing due to an unobserved obstruction. So the stated use of causing crashes still won't apply (unless you put a giant pair of negators over your entire car).

Yes, but no. People will do anything, and their AR devices are always worn. It's probably not allowed… if that mattered. Negators could easily have beneficial driving uses, as well.

Speaking as someone who's done an awful lot of driving in Seattle, I can say that because the rain is different there, it's not the hazard people imagine it to be. And even so, I can easily see how someone with Skill 0 in driving could default and be okay under standard rainy conditions. You can always assume your car has a Handling bonus that makes up the difference.

Snow, now? Yeah, things become crazy once snow starts to fall.

Seattle is also a tricky place to drive normally. Steep hills and manual transmissions don't go well together.
But in 2070, I expect everyone has an automatic.

Negator is a program not a device. They wouldn't be allowed to turn it on, but that's what your teams hacker is for. Even if we assume the best the program can do is replace bums on the street with an over lay of Ms. Luscious Brown Elf Nipples herself it's still useful for a team of runners to know their target runs a copy. Either dress like bums or have your hacker include your team in the definition of bums and be ignored by your target on the street! Or if you just want to be cruel to him replace Ms. Brown Elf Nipples with Bubba the Love Troll in all his naked rampant glory.


Now that I think about it that last option might be enough to cause a car crash all on it's own.

Exactly. 'They' really can't stop you from doing anything. How would they even detect if you had Negator running on your totally separate device(s)?

Everything is wireless, right? And security is a joke, right?

All depends on how you do it. The perception of weakness is a strength all on it's own.

You could always add Watcher spirits to the list of "undesirable" and have your manifested Watcher stand in front of the guard, obscuring his vision.