POV

Buying Spree and POV

/ staticsky

While Kaitlin is in spec heaven buying every piece of hardware she has ever read and drooled about, Adit and I got to work more on POV.

It was the perfect opportunity, I’m no longer worried about the funding presentation, and I’ve gotten over the fact that the months of preparation were somewhat for naught since Greystle basically threw the money at us and ignored the presentation. It would have been nice if they threw the money at us so that we could do what we wanted with the money, but I’m just glad we can keep Alpha running.

Ned barely ever shows up anymore. He’s off making speeches that Greystle sets up for him at various business events. They are treating him like some kind of politician: free food and free travel.

Adit is trying to get POV to interface with an entity living on Alpha. If we want to “see” really see, what is going on Alpha we have to choose location and time amounts and basically record it and then display the scene. Real time display of a location in Alpha would amount to just a blur as time whirled by quickly. But with POV we’ll see what something on Alpha sees, when they see it.

We’ll just flip the switch on and off and we should have experienced hours of time in that split second. Of course that might also kill us.

So we brought in Janice. Actually the real reason I wanted to bring in Janice was to show her I could reveal a secret to her; that I could open up to her. I can’t get her trust back with my still having secrets. Adit understood and was cool with that. The idea that POV with an Alphan might kill us was a secondary consideration. But Janice could definitely help with that.

When Adit was explaining how POV worked between he and Kaitlin he told a story I hadn’t heard before. In their earliest attempts Adit thought there was something wrong because he’d get sensations that didn’t fit the experience. He’d be plugged into Kaitlin and sounds would be accompanied by colors. Tastes and numbers as well. He was pretty sure they had some problems mapping vision correctly, until Kaitlin complained about how everything seemed a bit “flat.” When she’d hear something that way Adit heard it seemed hollow, though the sound was true.

Then he remembered Kaitlin is synesthesic and basically when she heard noises or saw numbers she would also see colors. The colors didn’t interfere, cloud, or alter what she saw, she just sensed the color. So many sense experiences were, well, colorful. Kaitlin never even thought of it, but when she experienced what Adit experienced it felt flat because it wasn’t the full experience. There was no feel for the color of the moments.

Janice took notes and was in rapt attention. She was fascinated.

Oh God it felt so good to be in the same room with her all day.

I miss her so much.

Catching up 2 – POV

/ staticsky

When I got back to the office I thought the first thing I’d hear about was the status of Alpha, but instead it was about the subject I dread: Politics

There is some kind of court case against President Prescott going on and that seems to be the new excuse for an increase in crime in town and even in the green zone. The thing Adit and Kaitlin wanted me to know was that there was a curfew now in the green zone. They figured I wasn’t aware of that and I wasn’t.

The campus security is also especially twitchy now.

More importantly though Adit and Kaitlin let me in on their little secret: Using the tech that keeps Adit… umm… Adit (and not Rasa), they are able to share experiences.

They started working on this right after Adit got his upgrade.

If you want any proof that Orexinal was affecting my performance I think you need go no further than the fact that my two main technical resources had basically been working part time on the alpha project and full time on their own experiment, and I had no idea.

Much like how Kaitlin and Adit upgraded Adit so that all electrical activity is recorded and “played back” to trigger his memory, they now can record the specific frequencies of each brain reaction to stimuli and compare that to how another brain reacts to the same stimuli. They can then create a mapping table between the two.

The program would learn how I see blue, and it would learn how Adit sees blue. Then I could look at blue, and record my brain looking at blue and then upload that recording to Adit. He’d then see the blue. It isn’t a recording of the blue or even my brain’s reaction to the blue. It is my brain’s reaction to the blue mapped to Adit’s brain’s reaction to blue. It would be what I saw as if he saw it.

Adit and Kaitlin mapped different sensory experiences. Their reactions to colors, shapes, smells, sounds, lights, all were mapped. Then touch. And as they are intimate now… all touch. They can really “share the experience.”

So besides transsexuals it looks like if Hera and Zeus ever get into an argument about sex again they can ask Adit or Kaitlin rather than just relying on the answer Tiresias gave. And no, I did not ask either Kaitlin or Adit which sex enjoys sex the most. And given the difference in anatomy and thus the difference in neuron wiring to respond to feedback from said anatomy the shared experience can really only ever be an approximation.

Actually all sensations through this tech will just be approximations, but according to Adit even just watching TV from the point of view of the person sitting next to you blows away any sense of “self.” And coming from a man whose every memory is triggered by a computer program that is saying something.

Over some beers we discussed what to call this and though I personally thought Perceptitron was cool and retro, in the end we decided to call the tech POV (Point of View) and we decided not to tell Greystle… or anyone else.