...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 4-4: QAR

Bear is in Ray's QAR development lab. It's a far cry from the original facility his mother Dema has described as "sitting in a big chair wearing hockey mitts and a motorcycle helmet." Now as he enters he dons a lightweight pair of glasses. All the electronics are in the thin frame. At the moment the lenses are perfectly transparent, but at his command they will send images to his eyes. The earpieces will send sounds to his ears by bone conduction. The only other function of the frame is to augment the sensors in the walls that detect his body position.

The wall sensors are not visible. The room is featureless, except for a single chair that is there only for Bear's convenience, so he won't have to stand the whole while. In fact the room is featureless to the degree that there are no corners, the surfaces gently curving into each other seamlessly. The lighting is also seamless, emitted by the walls themselves so evenly that it is disorienting. Bear involuntarily glances back at the door for a point of reference. He knows that at his command the walls will take on any background appearance he chooses, and the door too will disappear by virtue of the ability of his lenses to replace its visible details with the same background image. Even the chair can go away, but it must do so physically, sliding into the floor on command. Or it can be presented to his eyes with something other than its actual appearance. It can also alter shape and orientation, reclining or rotating in response to inputs.

The glasses, the chair and his feet on the floor are the only contact input his body will have. That's all he needs. It was discovered early in the development of virtual reality that the mind is very adept at interpreting nerve signals. It does not require them to come from natural sources. Perhaps the first clues of this should have been recognized long ago from the ability to understand spoken language, art and music. A stronger indication was available with the ability to read and write. But these were so commonplace they were taken for granted by the time a more compelling example arose. This was the ability of the blind to read Braille with their fingertips as easily as the sighted read print. Neuroscientists began to report that readers of Braille register almost exactly the same neural responses as sighted readers. Experimenters then found that people could learn to read Braille, or another code, through patterned stimulation of any patch of skin. It turned out that the type of signal didn't matter, it was the resulting interpretation into neural response patterns that conveyed information.

As QAR developed it was found that the mind could learn to interpret patterns of visual and aural input not only as visual and aural patterns but as patterns of touch, or of any other sense. This proved to be particularly true when the inputs were other than the normal ones. Pulses of light delivered subliminally to the edges of the visual field, accompanied by faint pulses of ultrasound to the ears, could be received as patterns of touch, smell, heat, whatever the mind had learned to associate with them. In a QAR setting these qualities in the simulation became nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, especially for a mind disposed to accept them. Bear has been familiar with this system almost from birth, had traveled the world in its embrace before he ever physically left the island. Now with Ray's help he is being trained in its methods of operation, and is enthusiastically engaged in the development of new ones.

Ray is the master at this, internationally known as one of the system's key developers. Bear knows well that for delivery of the finished program the glasses alone may be enough, with the viewer sitting in an easy chair in a darkened room. But for development, having the room supply the background image frees the viewing system to focus on new details.

As he settles into the chair, Bear recalls with a smile his recent observation that Ray seems to wear his QAR glasses all the time. Ray had responded with his usual enthusiasm for technological developments.

"That's because they're so awesome! I used to wear prescription lenses all the time, either in frames or contacts. Sometimes I wore both, because neither corrected everything at all distances. But now these lenses can actually detect when what I'm looking at isn't focused on my retinas, and augment the light field delivery so it does, so I see everything as clearly as possible! Not only that, the lenses can augment the light field to act like a telescope or microscope, so I can zoom in for close-ups. I control that with coded eye blinks. They can augment the light level too, to shield my eyes from the sun or give me night vision."

Ray took the glasses off to show them to Bear. When Bear handed them back Ray squinted momentarily as if puzzled that he couldn't see them better, then looked a bit sheepish after he put them on.

"Did you design them?"

"No, it was a top secret military project. But one of the developers is a friend of mine and he sent me this pair because he knew I would love them. I think they've been issued to all the Special Ops teams."

Bear was momentarily appalled to think he was now accidentally privy to inside knowledge of a top secret military project. But that was Ray, forever innocent of any concern about such pretensions. He wondered for a moment what leverage Tengri and the WBI people had that they could protect Ray from his own indiscretions. But then he thought that the military black ops people were still embarrassed by their failure to accept the Sun Bottle as a real asset and not a crackpot invention until it was too late to corral it. This monumental oversight had taught them to tread more lightly than they sometimes had in the past.

"Can the ones I'll be using in the QAR room do all that?"

Ray gave him a sly look. "They can now."