Springboard

to use the output jack on the glasses.

Crap.

He made a mental note to order a repeater if the new glasses worked, and then bent over to pick up the cable that had slipped out of the box when he opened it.

Wires. I hate wires.

He hadn’t had to use a cable to connect his VR gear since forever. Yet, at the same time that he was annoyed at having to regress to being tethered to his machine, he was intrigued. To require an optical cable, these things had to be drawing an awful lot of data to them.

He opened the cable packet and slipped one end into the right earpiece jack, then swiveled the end of the test machine around to find its VR card.

Do I even have optical in?

He searched the back of the machine, and was relieved to find one where he’d hoped on the VR card. Net Force cards were state-of-the-art with all the latest ICs and inputs. He hadn’t remembered the input, but since he hadn’t had to use it yet, there was no reason he should have.

He attached the cable to the card, snick. He spun up the odorama and pulled on some gloves. The LCD monitor tank he used when he wasn’t wearing VR gear lit up: New Hardware Detected. Updating.

Since he’d put the driver disc in his computer already, the process was fairly automatic. A calibration screen came up with another message: Please put on your new Raptor 9000X glasses!

He put on the glasses and saw his eyes reflected for a second, and then the holes in the corner of the glasses lit up and he gasped.

He flew over a huge plain. He looked down and saw the shadow of a great bird, and then looked ahead. There was movement. His vision zoomed in as he watched, and he saw a tiny field mouse scampering for safety toward a tiny hole that had to be its burrow.

The VR sim was on rails, so he couldn’t control where he was moving, but he could look around as he flew. The scene changed shockingly fast, clear colors, realistic mountains and scrub brush rising up to meet him as he landed and pounced on the mouse.

Again he soared, and a tiny translucent window appeared telling him to acquire three more targets to locate extreme eye focal points.

Fantastic.

It was like calibrating an old PDA’s stylus. He completed that stage of the calibration, and went to a testing range where his eye movement allowed him to change VR views almost instantly.

Eye movement tracking. That was brand-new. Such technology had been around for ages for helping paralyzed people, but coupled with the sharpness? It was very impressive.

Jay tilted his head slightly and moved his eyes, and the device compensated. Apparently there was some kind of tilt sensor in the glasses as well that read head inclination and mixed the data with the eye sensors.

Nice.

But best of all was the extreme resolution. VR was fairly realistic — at least his scenarios were — but this was like when his folks had gotten their first High-Definition TV set. He remembered how amazed he’d been to suddenly see how sharp TV looked — the sweat on the announcer’s head, the seams in scenery — things had reached an entirely new level of reality.

This is great.

He called up the documentation and checked his suppositions. Sure enough — there was a new Texas Instruments gyro chip that read head movement, and the tiny holes in the lens corners tracked his eye movements, then bounced three low-power laser beams off the mirrors — made by Nikon to the highest standards, if you could believe the rap — into his eye, painting directly on his retina. Things looked real, because as far as his eye was concerned, they were real.

Very clever work here.

Time to play.

He called up a favorite test scenario, a glade in Japan looking toward Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms falling around him.

It looked…

It looked like crap!

Jay walked over to the cherry tree and peered at it. Had the glasses malfunctioned?

No. There was the texture he’d programmed — it had looked great on his flexscreen glasses because their resolution was so low.

Holy cow.

The resolution on these glasses was so sharp that he could see the edges of the pixels. It was like stepping into a comic book from the real world.

Hmmm, I’ve got some work to do.

It wouldn’t do to have anyone else seeing his VR with these glasses, that was for sure. He’d have to amp up the textures, improve the bump-mapping, and double or triple the data throughout for this scene. No way he was going to be caught looking amateurish.

No wonder these things needed optical. It was like giving somebody who had 20/60 vision a pair of glasses that corrected for near-sightedness. They could see all right before the glasses, but afterward would be ever so much better.

Which gave him an idea.

He called up a firewall he’d been trying to break, looking to find the cracks where he could drive a code- breaking spike.

On his older VR visual gear he hadn’t been able to see any difference in the smooth, black obelisklike wall. But with the Raptor’s resolution, he could suddenly see a pattern of cracks where data structures joined together and made up the firewall. Yeah, sure, it was part metaphor and part construction, but he’d take it.

Just glancing at the wall with these new glasses, and he could see exactly where to crack that wall. He was sure of it.

Now, that was cool.

Net Force was going to be outfitted with these within a few days — hours — if Jay had his way. As soon as they hit the commercial market, there was gonna be a boatload of VR reconstruction as other makers suddenly saw their constructs in a bright new light, but until then, wearing these babies would make you at least a prince in the land of the blind, if not the king.

Until these things became common, the bleeding edge of technology was gonna be something with which Jay Gridley could slice the bad guys.

He couldn’t wait to show this to somebody.

“Jay?”

The voice brought him back to the moment. He looked up and saw his assistant standing there. He blinked at her. “Huh?”

“I have Mr. Chang here to see you.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Sure. Send him in.”

A moment later, she was back, leading a short and definitely Chinese-looking man in a gray suit.

“Mr. Gridley. My honor to meet you.”

Jay waved that off. “Mr. Chang.” He stood. The two shook hands.

“Cal Tech, right?”

“Class of ’03,” Chang said.

“Come on in. Take a look at this.” He waved at his computer. “You’re not gonna believe these visuals!”

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