synthetic senses

Trope-a-Day: Bizarre Alien Senses

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Bizarre Alien Senses: Well, hell, who doesn’t have some sort of bizarre senses? Especially since it gets very tricky if you count the whole electromagnetic spectrum as one – i.e., “ultravision” and “infravision” are both strict subsets of “vision”. As, for that matter, is sensing gamma rays – and other similar elisions. It’s not like anyone gets to claim the canonical radiation range for “sight”, now is it?

But we’ve got people sensing everything from low infrared to high UV, with bioradio senses, with the ability to detect electromagnetic fields both static and changing, with the ability to feel the curvature of space-time (that would be those bionano vector-control effectors again), with echolocation and/or sonar, the ability to read plasmids by tasting them, and pretty much any other physical effect that you can measure somehow on the macroscale.

(The current eldrae alpha baseline clocks in at 24 recognized senses, by the way, counting the synthetic and transcendent ones, and that’s after considering smell and taste as one: photoception, audition, chemoception/olfaction, static mechanoception, dynamic mechanoception, thermoception, nociception, static electroception, dynamic electroception, proprioception, chronoception, farspeech, spatioception, secondary gestalt, secondary linear, mesh, metadata, worth, mnemonesis, nature, utility, entelechy, obligation, and autosentience.)

Trope-a-Day: Stat-O-Vision

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Stat-O-Vision: Augmented reality – hooked up to scanning equipment, civilian v-tags, mugshot databases, and suchlike provides exactly this for everyone, all nearly formatted with architect’s lines extending into secondary visual fields and more sophisticated UI systems for common stats (see Aura Vision for one example), with all the necessary basic hardware built right into your head.

Not just for fighting strength, of course – you can get, depending on what information you have access to, everything from their personal profile to medical data to reputation scores to current geolocation to twitter-equivalent feed and blog to IM/texting window this way, and/or hyperlink (“sopholink”) directly to them.

Trope-a-Day: Augmented Reality

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Augmented Reality: Ubiquitous, to the point of being built into everyone’s brain.  Includes mediated reality, in which physical-world objects are adjusted before the brain gets to sense them; mingled reality, in which a virtual realm and a physical room coexist as the same space, and physical and virtual objects behave as peers; and hypertextual reality, which goes one step further and feeds the information about objects (rather than displaying it as tags) directly into one’s brain, so that you remember the details about them without having to learn them in the first place.

Also rather notable in this area is the synthetic sense technology that persuades the brain to provide additional visual fields and auditory channels in parallel to the natural ones to display information on/in.