QUOTE (Paul @ Dec 9 2011, 03:12 PM)

I was actually discussing hacking the walls sensors to use them to monitor the room. Obviously they'd be of limited use-but it's an option.
Any two imaging devices inside a room will typically make it possible to exactly calculate the position of any target within the vision of both sensors [unless for some reason it's impossible to calculate the position of the sensors relative to the shooter, and typically lots of trigonometry will get you that], using off-the-shelf image processing software. The proliferation of sensing devices in Shadowrun would likely be extraordinary; already, every Wiimote in the world is a camera, every Kinect in the world is a camera; most phones have cameras, and most laptops and tablets as well; many desktop computers and televisions have cameras. In Shadowrun, many more devices would have some kind of imaging device, if only to see someone's in front of them, and to know who that person is. Certainly most walls [so they can also be tridphones] in middle-class [and above] areas would be video walls of one kind or another. Motion lights. The soy dispenser has a camera so it can track who ate what, for your diet software; scales have an imaging sensor for the same reason.
This is presuming, of course, that they don't just have a robot vacuum. Any robot vacuum will have enough relative positioning information that it alone would be more than sufficient to pinpoint the target for a shooter, and do so with enough accuracy that there shouldn't be any
visual penalties. And this should all more-or-less just happen, but it always seems fair to buy a tacnet to make it official-ish. But as a GM, I would present no penalties to indirect shooting this way; anyone who's seen Photosynth knows it's easily possible to seamlessly present visual information from different sources, and do so with very high accuracy, using only visual data to provide relative positioning. I envision "Captain's Chair" mode [no longer applicable, per se], or tacnets, as being very like a real-time Photosynth cloud.