My character is going to make some holo-clothing and as the Cyberpunkesque genre isn't really my stronghold I would be happy to hear out anyone's ooc ideas or thoughts on how to go about doing these.
Thanks in advance.
I am going to have to be clever about how I do the clothing messages and will probably end up utilising the @tease/@otease for the changing holographic images.
I hope that helps.
The other idea is for them to be plain grey holosuits. Then the projection could come from all over the body.
I would imagine that the second would be quite expensive.
of couse, while you cannot project anything into the void, because you need something to project light _on_, you could naturally project objects into _air_. however, you would need something like several perfectly coordinated laser cannons to do such a thing, and there's no way to attach them to the body that should be dressed. and yeah, it would be see-through if it wasn't supposed to be blindingly bright. a huge amount of cpu power would have to be invested in measuring the body's movements and calculate how the clothing would fall, swing around etc.
by the way, have a look at the show riviera pulls off in neuromancer – a totally different (and, imho, equally unrealistic/stupid) approach to virtual clothing.
We already have LCD displays, whats stopping us from making LC thread? Jack it into a control mechinism and then blamo. You add power and can reconfigure the crystals to your hearts extent. Using that, the computer can run through and configure each thread individually to create shapes, colors, etc.
using something like that for cloaking wouldn't work much better than an ordinary camouflage pattern that mimics the background you're standing in front of. of course, the ability to adapt to a new background in the fraction of a second would eb a huge advantage, but still you couldn't do much more than lean against a wall and stop moving to hide from people that are on the other side of a fairly big room. you couldn't walk thorugh the middle of the room and expect your chameleron-clothes to project an exact image of what ever your body occludes into any possible direction.
one more thing i'd like to add to the discussion: in order to generate an image consisting of pixels, you have two choices: either you want to be your screen to be as dark as possible (like tv or pc monitors or backlit lc displays) and emit light, or you want to change it's colour, i.e. the wabelengths of the light it reflects (like passive lc displays). one technique wouldn't work well in a very bright environment, while the other would have it's problems in dark situations. so maybe you'd want your chameleon-clothes to be able to do both.
Can someone translate it into low-tech English for me?
@chastity: oh yeah, projected clothes, what a funny idea… but actually, you didn't even provide half of an idea there. you didn't mention what the clothes should be projected _on_ (the naked skin? now that would be cool), nor from _where_ they should be projected (where would you mount projectors that cannot be covered? inside the person, beaming through the guts onto the back of the skin?).
(Edited by Chastity at 10:57 am on Mar. 28, 2002)
