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siMsense and skillware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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SiMSenSe:
experience everYtHing
The span of human history is dotted by transformational
technologies, discoveries that have shifted the way we live in
dramatic ways: gunpowder, the light bulb, the assembly line,
the airplane, the splitting of the atom, and the Internet, to name
a few. In 2018, Dr. Hosato Hikita unveiled another of these
transformational technologies in a cramped conference room at
ESP Systems in Chicago. The technology was Artificial Sensory
Induction System Technology, or ASIST. With ASIST, Dr. Hikita
was able to record a subject’s full sensory experiences and transmit
that recording to another subject’s brain, invoking a copy of the
senses in the second subject. The result is the ability to experience
something fully without actually having experienced it first-hand.
This new form of media is dubbed “simsense.”
ASIST and the simsense it created have reshaped the Sixth
World. Simsense has revolutionized entertainment media and
skillsofts have changed the way people learn and work. The Matrix
was built on an ASIST framework and the augmented reality of
today’s Matrix would not be possible without advances in the same
basic technology that Dr. Hikita showed off in 2018.
anatoMY of an aSiSt SignaL
When you listen to a piece of recorded music, you are actually
listening to a collection of tracks made up of numerous frequencies
of sound. Each of the instruments and the vocalist are usually
their own track and within each track the sound includes different
frequencies which can be isolated. Similarly, an ASIST signal is a collection
of tracks, each one representing a different sense or emotion.
The sensory tracks are divided into exteroceptive and interoceptive
tracks. Exteroceptive tracks include the traditional senses of sight,
smell, hearing, touch, and taste that process the outside world.
Interoceptive tracks include senses originating within the body, such
as balance, a sense of motion, pain, hunger and thirst, and a general
sense of the location of one’s own body parts. ASIST engineers
define experiences by how they register on the various tracks. For
instance, the experience of looking at a cloud will register almost
exclusively on the exteroceptive sight track. The experience of falling
registers almost exclusively on the interoceptive balance track. The
experience of smelling freshly baked blueberry muffins registers on
the exteroceptive smell and taste tracks, but could also register on
the interoceptive hunger track.
Emotive tracks are divided by the neurobiological systems
they evoke, which in turn activates or suppresses an emotional
response. Some of the emotive tracks typically used include the
sympathetic, parasympathetic, adrenal, thalamic, hypothalamic,
and limbic tracks. They will control pleasure and pain, wakefulness,
blood pressure, fight-or-flight instinct, sexual arousal,
short- and long-term memory, rational thinking, mood, and many
other emotional responses.
Like the frequencies of a song’s vocal track, each track in an
ASIST recording also carries a three-dimensional signal map that
corresponds to the position of an electrical signal in the brain and
the strength of that signal. Over the length of a track, different
areas of the brain are stimulated at different strengths, invoking
the sensory and emotive responses in the subject’s brain. The combination
of these signals is what creates the simsense experience.
A simsense recording is classified in one of two ways, depending
on the tracks it carries. Baseline recording includes only
the sensory tracks. A user experiencing a baseline recording will
get the full sensory experience, but their emotions will be their
own. Full-X (“full experience”) recordings include the sensory
and emotive tracks. Users experiencing a Full-X recording will
find their own emotions influenced or dominated by the emotive
tracks of the recording, depending on the strength and quality
of the signal.
prodUcing a SiM
A great simsense experience is more than just a good EC/
IC modulator chip or autonomic response smoothing processor.
Excellent performers, a skilled director, and a talented post-production
team can separate last year’s forgotten straight-to-baseline
release from this year’s award-winning blockbuster. The sim industry,
like the film, television, and music industries before it, comes
down to the indefinable “star quality” of its talent.
the cast
No matter how many actors are in a given sim production,
usually only a handful are wired for simsense recording. These
actors will almost always have implanted simrigs; trodes produce
inferior recordings and are only used on low budget projects.
Wired actors are known as performers in the business, while the
other actors are flats (extras that provide background in a scene),
props (actors who interact verbally or physically with the wired
performers) or targets (actors who are involved in complex and
interactive scenes with the performers, such as fight scenes or
love scenes).
The number of wired performers is kept to a minimum because
each performer is providing a separate point-of-view (POV)
in the production. Adding multiple POVs is not only expensive,
but it also makes it harder to tell a cohesive story. It is also typical
that only one or two performers are wired for Full-X recording,
while the others only record in baseline. Cost is one factor here,
but there’s also the fact that only top-notch simsense performers
can provide a convincing emotive recording that can fool an audience.
True simstars are often method actors to the highest degree,
literally becoming their role as an effective method of producing
utterly convincing emotional states.
Nearly all sim productions release with just one or two POVs,
usually the protagonist and a single supporting role. Special edition
releases produced later will add on other POVs, such as other
supporting roles or the antagonist. There’s a strong market for
bonus POVs from the villain’s perspective.
tricks of the trade
Sim performers are kept in peak physical condition. When
an audience is feeling every aspect of the performer’s experience,
they don’t want to be experiencing lower back pain or a wheezing
cough. Those undesirable experiences can be scrubbed in post-production,
but if a studio wants to get the most out of its performers,
it will keep them in good shape. For a Full-X performer not in
their prime form, tricks such as medication and hypnotherapy are
sometimes used to elicit particular emotional responses. Some
desperate performers have even turned to personafixes and other
BTLs to prepare for a role, but those efforts can burn out a per-
Unwired
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9