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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it's inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn't have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was

It remains a neat way to get around the display problem, though. Even if most practical work in cyberspace takes place on 2D surfaces, nobody really wants to cart around a pair of 34 inch 4k monitors to work on the go.

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It may be a little boring but a laptop is basically a "cyber deck".

This came up while I was playing ShadowRun, a cyberpunk game where decks are wielded by spellcaster-type characters in a way that resembles how wands are used by Harry Potter characters (more or less).

There's something about the way that a laptop screen folds towards you (like it might be part of a maw that consumes you and traps you inside it), and about how the input and output surfaces are so close together that you have to hunch to use it, which makes laptops an unsatisfying form factor for a deck.

Imagine the scene in LOtR where Gandalf says "you shall not pass" to the Balrog. A good deck would fit into that scene without making Gandalf look like a dweeb.

There was all sorts of gameplay reasons also as to why they did it, but in shadowrun's 3e->4e transition they changed the whole decks and hacking from a hardwired matrix where people jack in to a basically... wifi/5g type affair. I always felt it lost part of the strange/cool factor in that move.

If I think along the line of B5's technomages, Gandalf's staff is his cyberdeck. It has everything built into it, with a verbal and touch interface to access it. All he'd need is a small, highly directional speaker built into his cloak or hat, and he'd be set.

"You shall not pass!"

"Initializing scan. Acoustic scan of bridge indicates significant brittleness in materials. Initializing directional vibratory motivators to further destabilize bridge materials."

No, you are getting it wrong =)

If you thinkg about it, your command line prompt dispatches and parses "spells" to "tame"... daemons.

Is this why manpages resemble grimoires?

        man -Tpdf perlintro > perlintro.pdf

Kinda.

I would even posit that the modern smart phone meets the requirements as well. I've seen people walking around defcon with Nreal glass on while they were moving about, so there's still ways of modernizing the styling/ ethos of the original intent.

Yeah that's true. Though usually I see more of a retinal display but that's also more of a times piece sort of thing. Carrying around goggles is also kind of makes you really stand out. Google Glasses were pretty interesting in the early 2010s. Realistically for a netrunner, you aren't even really coding while you're at the location, Mr.Robot does a good job with this but in a different way.

that in-meatspace ar/vr devices would be unavoidably nerdy was a trope since at least Snow Crash: “gargoyles” weren’t exactly well regarded.

If we’re going there we might as well have cybernetic eyes right? As long as you can somehow attach the nerves to your new eyes.

"Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers. This is true for interface hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts in the neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg, already looks slightly quaint. The real cyborg, the global organism, is so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval." -Gibson

That's where things tend to become more complicated. It's dependent on what you're writing and when it's occurring. It's a big leap from retinal displays and discrete leds to full on eyes. Neuroprosthetics especially the Bionic eye are a more complicated. There are biological and technical factors that play a part. Often this is ignored but you kind of can't really do that.

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