few questions:
If one can see heat then I would assume on could see thermals would that be agreeable? So someone say flying could see best areas to catch up drafts.

Now I was thinking of a device or power that allowes you to see scent or smells.So one could track by sight,they say dogs can see scents and I saw a programme on a piece of cyber wear that exsists well I say cyber where when its just a snazy gixmo attached to someones head, this guy was born colour blind so they invented this device that distingueshes colour into sound, he can tell you what a colour is 100% of the time by the pitchs the machine makes (true story) he is an artist. I thought what about a device for scent into sight I imagine it would require some link into a HUD or glasses or cyber eye etc etc.

It would thus be faster to track by scent then if you were relying on a dog cause you could see the scent.Obviously limited to ranges and so on but any ideas on that?


Another piece of Kit I thought of:
One of my characters likes using an optic fiber to see under doors etc etc
I was thinking of a optic fiber built into the sleeve of my combat armour linked to my HUD, does anyone object to being able to use the optic fiber through a smartgun link to controle its movement? and retract it and extend it.

There is already an Animal Sense spell.

Ok but what about cyber technology?

Regarding the first bit: that makes sense at first blush, keeping in mind that I'm almost asleep right now. Certainly any good sensor suite should be able to do it if it's doable at all.

Scent <-> sight converter I could see. I'm not entirely sure of the market, but I think with some properly sensitive samplers it could be done.

~J

Sight and sound work by waves that bounce off of things and then hit your sensory organs (eyes and ears). When you look at a desk, the desk doesn't actually go into your eye. Your eye just senses the light waves that have bounced off the desk. When you listen to a trumpet, the trumpet doesn't actually go into your ear, your ear just senses sound waves that have travelled from the trumpet.

Because sight and sound work in similar fashions, it makes sense that there should be ultrasound vision (and in practice, there is) because all we have to do is make a device capable of detecting sound waves and turn them into light waves by displaying the data over a video screen. Infrared vision just takes waves we normally can't see and turns them into ones we can.

Smell, on the other hand, doesn't have anything to do with waves. Smell happens because the actual molecules that cause the smell have entered your nose. We only detect smells that have travelled to us. There is no way of telling what it smells like on the other side of a room unless we travel there and smell the air that's there.

Perhaps some sort of smell analyzer combined with some sort of sensors that monitor air pressure might be able to produce some sort of data that tells you what direction a particular smelling gas came from, but I think that's about as close as you could get.

But then, I'm no scientist so who knows...

I was thinking once the unit identified one smell the scent it was tracking, then it would read the um space ahead of located scent and build a pattern based on wind factors,chill,heat,moister, proberbility to pinpoint direction as once you have say 3 feet pinpointed you step forward and you constantly would have that range if you follow what I mean, I dont think Im explaining this to well, Now the three feet was an exsample but with todays sensor technology (I mean 2064) what with cemical sniffers I would imagine the range of such a device could be broadened from 3 feet to say maybe even twenty feet, so I find my trail I take a step towards it and for twenty feet radius I would know what direction that scent went in so say the targets wearing 'ooz chanelle no 9' just made that up, you the device picks up a plethora of scents the device user trained in its use selects the scent he finds most trackable and starts to follow, twenty feet every step of the way he would no what direction the scent goes in, and you could rate the device so a rating ten could be more likely to track two scents at once for purposes of a second subject crossing the path who is also wearing Ooz no 9 now I dont see a huge market for this device but say you needed someone quickly in a crowd I was thinking a rating 10 machine costing an arm and a leg with all the add one I mentioned could pin point a subject, and imagine if you had the subjects Dna persay like sweat, you could swab the device with the scent and lower target numbersI dont know. It is simply an idea. But it proposes a few intresting question............what do spirits smell like? now I recon you all say nothing but can we be sure maybe on some sub level they do smell, and with said device they could be tracked by a mundane (no Im not wanting to be a ghost buster lol) Also there are refrences that the catholic church believes molevolent spirits exude an aromoa of rotten eggs. who knows. Just some thoughts.Thanks for imput so far its very interisting.

The problem is, a sniffer by its nature has zero range. You can crank up the sensitivity such that it will register a hit on a very small number of particles, but they still have to reach the sniffer.

It would probably help to have a very thin wand to wave around. Like walking around, but without the air displacement.

~J

Ok but why is a sniffer so bad? and my argument is once say your sniffer translated your scent into visual it would use all the other mentioned things to make it more preceptable.Plus are you using sniffers of 2005 or of 2064 as how can we truely be sure where tech will be then

It's not bad per se, it's just a part of what it does. Much like how light has to reach your eyes to see something, the scent particles have to reach the sniffer for it to detect them. We can't see objects across the room if there's no light coming from them to us, likewise we can't smell things unless bits of them have already reached us.

Explanation incoherence due to rapidly failing consciousness.

~J

Yeah ok but Im not trying to sniff something across a room Im trying to locate a certain scent and follow it, and once the device has the scent identified I am trying to find away to track it further by sight so Im trying to devise a device that can translate smell into visualization now yes a lot will say that cant be done but many said that the molocule was the smallest thing until we split it and I am hardly proposing rocket science, I believe as do some scientists that dogs can see scents In fact I know it is true I unfortunatly dont have the resorces to back it up.But I saw on an episode of 911 that a certain sniffer dog was not finding a missing child so they brought in a diff k9 unit trained to see scent as loony as that sounds Im not making it up.I will do a serch online now try find it.But if this dog does exist then smell can be seen.

Again, easiest way is with very sensitive sensors positioned at different points and moved around, preferably with minimal other air displacement. That should give you as accurate a picture as can be gotten, unless I'm missing something.

~J

Thanks.Appriciate the imput, any views on can spirits be tracked? Of course why would one want to do something so silly but Im curious.If they can be tracked maybe a certain decker from a certain Dragon thread wants to use it.

My first inclination, and the easiest way to handle it, is to say that they cannot be tracked. If you're feeling ambitious, break it down by spirit type (a City Spirit appearing as an automobile may be detectable like a real automobile would be, while a Wind Spirit would at best be detectable as an area of fresher air).

~J

Yeah tend to agree spirits are odorless think I was thinking ghosts anyway.Thanks all.

They can be tracked using the Adept Tracking power in Target: Awakened Lands, page 107. It costs one power point, and turns your character into a tracker like La Fours. Easier getting that then relying on improved senses, though not as versatile.

I'm not going to disagree that dogs can "see" scents, but I'm going to point out the fact that they probably don't have a visual representation as to which direction scents go. The concept of "Red Herring" is using a stinky fish to sidetrack and confuse dogs. Aniseseed and other strong herbs can also do the same. The sense of smell is based on particulate matter dispersed in a medium (air or water). It would require movement or multiple sensors placed somewhat apart to triangulate positions and vectors. I can see a cyberware that puts a halo overlay on your peripheral vision, increasing in intensity of color on increased contacts and changing hue according to chemical structure. You would simply follow the direction that gives you the brightest, "bluest" light... you might get off the trail a bit now and then, but continual movement would get you in vaguely the right direction.

Scent only, at best, will be able to judge direction, strength and the nature of the smell. So you could get a representation of a big arrow saying 'it comes from THAT WAY!' but it couldn't accurately judge if it continues in that direction for any distance.

Keep in mind, you'd be judging this by having a few sensors and you'd simply decide where on your body the scent is strongest. Presumably, that's the right direction. Should we have something that releases its scent unevenly as it travels (first step releases a quarter liter of gas, second step releases an eigth, third step releases half), the direction thing will go bonkers.

If you want to 'see' a scent, why not use a mass spectrometer? I believe that works by watching the refraction of light as it passes through the molecules. I don't know if those can actually be made to be ranged, but supposing they can in 60 years, it would show the nature of whatever you're looking at.

Though perhaps, just perhaps, it would be possible to use a highly sophisticated laser/spectrometer array to identify chemical compounds in the air at a distance, thereby creating a visual analogy to "scent".

The problem with that is that you'd need a really sophisticated sensor setup to do anything like that, and I don't think it's plausible with SR canon tech - not when you consider how much power an eye laser like that would need (and how much processing power...and how much range and speed of motion and change of focus and...).

Where's Cray74? We should ask him.

As for the eye on a stick, it would be pretty easy to make the eye movements correspond to the simple commands the smartlink is capable of, but your range of movement would be pretty limited.

rough example:
shoot -> pan right
safety on -> pan left
safety off -> pan up
eject magazine -> pan down

As long as the device is quite simple, controling it through the smartlink should be easy. If you actually have a datajack (and not just a smartlink) then controllling such a device becomes trivial, no matter how many points of articulation it might have.
Notice that your datajack need not be on your wrist either, you could plug into the suit, which is connected to the eye thingy.

It's also a safe assumption that 'datajack hubs' will be easy to come by, so if you need to plug in your plamtop, eye thingy, radio, telephone, cd player, and toaster all into your head at once, you plug your head into a datajack hub, and then plug all your devices into the hub...

Datajack hub = slightly more expensive version of skillsoft jukebox, I would think.