I've been playing around with sketching my character, and been slowly getting back into sketching. I want to however do a few pics of equipment and pics with equipment in them, possibly like the inside of a cyberdeck.

I've assembled more than enough PCs in my time to know how the insides of present day PCs, notebooks and other bits of tech look. What I'm interested in, is what are the trends that are developing today that might shape the look of things in 50 years?

Are we still going to have masses of clunky capacitors? Data Ribbons? Slot interfaces? Circuits winding all over the board, with the odd wire soldered in and going to a far off component?

What do we know about cyberdecks in shadowrun, what technology do they use and do we have any idea of what it might look like?

Also other items, data-screens : will they look like modern flatscreens?
Cell-phones, shape, size, styling? Wiring inside vehicles and drones, are we talking masses of wires? Will they still use wire?

Would we still use chips and circuit-boards like today, what shape would they be?

Well, computing is optical, so instead of little wires on circuit boards, there will be little fiber-optic cables all over. Many aspects of technology will have the potential to be tiny, but of larger size due to user needs or durability needs.

In summary: lots of blinking lights, can't go wrong with those.

for 'modern' tech, i tend to envision very few moving parts, lots of holographic interfaces, etcetera.

The interior should have a lot of transparent bits... fiber optic cables, perhaps transparent (holographic) memory storage, which would look clear but maybe give off rainbows from different angles. Very few moving parts. Since there's chip readers, and these have been drawn in various pictures as being slots, there's definitely little slots to plug things in to. Any wire that goes outside the board should be shielded, so it would look like today's stuff.

But mostly, let your imagination go.

JaronK

Yeah, one thing that holds true in all of the SR artwork, the artists generally pay little attention to the description of the gear.

(Such as the Seattle book depicting a Moller air car when they don't appear in the game)

The non-SR but more realistic advances in computer technology are going to be at a quantum level. Now that they have actually demonstrated quantum teleportation, that technology has the potential to completly remake the topography of future networks. Rather than cables and thousands of miles of fiber op lines, information will literally be teleported from machine to machine with no loss of data or transfer time. The practical limitations will be the processing speeds of the machines doing the transfers and the ammount of sympathic material involved in the transfer process.

Nanotechnology as advanced as what is being displayed in Shadowrun would really be the grail of computer miniturization. The size of the machines being described in SR books is silly with this technology being so common in the setting. Its based on 80's and 90's concepts of computer terminals and keyboards. With nanotech being as pervasive as it is in SR its unlikely that computers themselves would be large enough to be noticable without specifically looking for them.

They are already working on retinal screens in which a laser uses a person's retina to flash an image of the information that a traditional monitor displays. It operates like a HUD except that it lays it directly over your optic lense rather than onto a dashboard. Your own retina becomes an identifier, and when linked to you SIN on advertisement databases across the net (whatever that is in those days) it becomes the perfect and most invasive marketing tool to date. All your buying habits and personal tastes are tracked (as described in the Matrix suppliment) and personalized ads are instantly generated tailored to the individual being sent the information. Imagine walking down a mall and having hundreds of laser's vying for your attention so they could fill you optic senses with advertisements of the wares in thier stores. Each ad showing you images of what you would look like wearing thier brand of shoes/shirts/suites or how happy you look eating thier soybased foods or driving thier car... It would spawn a new market for laser reflective glasses or contacts. With "trodes" or datajacks the optical laser montior becomes extinct in static enviroments (such as your home).

Most SR games show datajacks as having wires emerging from them. Thats unlikely to the point of being silly. Wires are simply too dangerous and can cause serious problems, particuarly when attached to something imbedded in your skull. Wireless Datajacks are far more likely if this technology ever exists, and there isn't much chance that we are going to have holes drilled into our heads large enough to slip a piece of metal into it. Rather nanofibers will be "grown" through the bone to attach to recievors in the brain and the process will be organic, capable of repairing itself by regrowing damaged or biologically sealed off nanowires. Nanosized trancievors will speak to net enabled trancivors to keep recipients of this technology "connected" 24/7.

Welcome to Borg.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

No kidding. I've been watching Stand Alone Complex and it's like that series could actually be called Reasons to Not Have a Cyber-Brain. In the later episodes, there's a guy who is basically invisible because he can hack everyone's heads.

Are you kidding? They're reasons to have a cyberbrain. And a good attack barrier. And a good virus suite, not that old HA-3 drek.

If you really want the full implications, go watch Innocence.

~J

Bah. Who can afford that? Not the average schmoe who gets hacked into some sort of Byzantine assassination plot. And even a good reactive barrier isn't invincible. The Laughing Man played Section 9 just as hard as anyone else.

It's only just now in a theatre where I live. (Finally!) I'm probably going tonight.

A system like that creates the potential for us to be victims of a Laughing Man.

It also creates the potential for a Laughing Man (or someone similar, if you agree with Aramaki's final assessment of the situation) to arise. It sacrifices safety for potential.

I'm still young and foolish, so that's an attractive prospect for me.

~J

The only problem with safety-for-potential tradeoffs is that it seems like the stakes get higher as the technology gets more advanced. But that's another matter entirely.

At any rate, whenever someone wonders why datajacks aren't wireless, the answer that pops up in my mind is security, security, security.

Edit: Wow, just noticed how far I am off of the original topic.

...and of course, bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. SR makes a point to mention that the rigger decks are just about the only thing that can handle a full-fledged simsense signal over the airwaves, and those things aren't cheap.

'Course, assuming SR tech actually advances, pretty soon wireless datajacks should be common - and I know groundwork has been laid for them what with Erika's Wireless Matrix Initiative, and all that.

edit: forgot. SotA:2064 introduces the link club. Which apparently includes a short-range wireless matrix repeater, of sorts, to wear within the club. So we are getting there...

and before someone goes nuts about cyberdecks and simsense, decks dont communicate simsense. what they communicate is something more like a html description of the place and then generate simsense based on that (this is why one can apply reality filters mutch like one apply a local css layout to a remote page today). the RC deck of a rigger on the other hand gets its data from the black box in the drone or vehicle, feed over a wireless connection, complete with live video and audio inputs and whole lot else.

as for piber optics all over the place. maybe in the wires that connect external components together (and who can tell a normal wire and a fibre optic one if they are both black and hooked into some box? that is by looking at the wire, not the jack btw). internaly we will most likely see something similar to todays integrated circuits, just that they are nanoscale light paths rather then electron carriers. rember the image of the first transistor vs what we have today and then look at the images of people working with prototype light based computers and then let it travel down the same path.

and one good factor for light based computing is the fact that you can stack in 3d. a cpu today cant realy be made as a cube as the core would not be able to get rid of heat fast enough. therefor you dont have to make stuff that is broad and flat.