Sounds like a great way to serve someone papers in Eclipse Phase (almost assuredly an outdated profession but it made me giggle none-the-less). "Oh what a nice cactus..I don't remember seeing it here before is it new?" >blip< *resolves into a man in a snappy vac suit* "Deloris Folsom? You've been served..."

You'd have to hack them pretty significantly. It's easier to just buy a Chameleon Cloak… and basically everyone wears smart clothing that acts similarly anyway. Don't forget about the many various enhanced senses (and carried/emplaced sensors) that are also in play.

While I'd agree that not looking out of the ordinary is the best way to hide in plain sight, you'd have to be careful about an AR overlay of a synthmorph if you're in a biomorph. No one gives the synthmorph panhandler a second glance, but unless it's common practice in a locale for panhandlers in biomorphs to present AR overlays of synths, then you might just have made yourself more notable rather than less. Also worth mentioning is that people can and do run their own private AR -- short of hacking their PAN, it doesn't matter very much what AR presentation you offer if they're not accessing the local AR feed; you're going to get processed into their AR by whatever parameters they've established.

Given the initial question, I've been assuming that the attempt to hide via AR would be occurring somewhere that most people will already be opting in. Otherwise, yes, doing so becomes even more problematic to impossible.

So you never wear noise-cancelling headphones to block out the sounds around you when you're listening to music or on an airplane? You've never worn a sleep mask because you need to sleep and you're not somewhere that you can turn off the lights? That's giving up sensory control, albeit to a much lesser degree, and most of us do it willingly because we know we can regain control at will. My impression of the setting is that AR is much the same thing -- people often immerse themselves in it quite willingly because it makes for a much richer experience and they know their muse is monitoring their unmodified perceptions to alert them to anything they'd need to know about, and they know that they can turn it off at will. I know if I were in EP playing an AR game with my friends, I'd find it pretty crappy if saw their real appearance overlaid by a ghostly image of their in-game avatar instead of just seeing their avatar, and I wouldn't want the ghostly facade of a fantasy world superimposed over my real surroundings -- that's not a very immersive gaming environment. Likewise, we know that people can edit their environments in realtime as they see fit -- that super-rich hypercorp executive quite literally may not see the sythnmorph beggar on the side of the street, because such individuals offend her sensibilities and she's chosen to edit them out. Her muse would alert her and remove the filter (assuming she didn't have bodyguards present, of course) if the beggar pulled a knife and came at her or behaved suspiciously. If you're in a situation where you expect trouble, then yeah, I could see avoiding opting in to the local AR, but I don't see most people seeing any reason NOT to opt in most of the time.

I mentioned muses as failsafes in my first post in the thread, so we don't disagree on that apsect of things at all. Double-checking, though, I also note that that the book does specify that AR is usually presented as something ghostly or otherwise artificial specifically to avoid confusion with reality, and I was assuming that a location's AR (if you opted in) typically went with more realism, so that you might well not know unless you asked your muse whether the painting on the wall was real or virtual. So while my vision of a location's AR overlay _could_ be done, it wouldn't be the norm.

You'd use the standard hacking rules (around p254). Cyberbrains have extra hacking options, but I'm not sure they're too relevant. The thing is that it's very hard to do this subtly, and you have to (or what's the point?).

Game-mechanics wise, most people have the standard muse, so not too much difference on that end (save for people who use forks or infomorphs as muses, of course.) As this thread has highlighted, though, using AR to sneak or vanish is problematic at best. Attempting to hack someone's PAN is going to be time-consuming and is likely to fail if they've got any kind of reasonable defenses in place. It would also only work on one person at a time, which makes it worthless for escapes from a group. It really does sound like you should just get a chameleon cloak, as has already been suggested. No hacking required, works on groups, and isn't very expensive to obtain.

You'd have to: a) add yourself to the kill file, b) activate the kill file without the muse or individual noticing, and c) circumvent the muse sufficiently that it doesn't monitor the unaltered visual feeds. This is all theoretically possible, but not something that you could rely on accomplishing at all, much less at combat speed (which is generally the speed you're working at if someone is trying to evade you or you're needing to get away from them.) Even if you do manage to get someone's PAN that badly hacked, at that point you don't _need_ to keep yourself hidden from them anymore. You're the one with the power at that point. It's also still useless against more than one person. So what's the point? Why go through the trouble and high risk of failure when you could just activate your chameleon cloak to disappear?

If you use the AR as an extra level of hacking, then the programs will run through the mesh using the AR. So, if you alter the AR to put an AR wall, they wouldn't reach you (literal example can be seen in Dennou Coil). The "use the AR to turn me invisible" can be seen in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and can be made an optimal solution if you face a lot of enemies connected using a tactical network (hack one, modify the tacnet, enjoy the show). The more enemies you affect this way, the more efficient the tactic is. Anyway, I'd say that 90% of the people will be fooled by AR modifications, and you don't need to hack them. Acess the habitat AR overlay system, and convince it to show a wall over your position. And there you are, a small hole to hide where people won't usually think about looking inside. Workers and maintenance people, on the other side, could see you... I think a handfull of specialists won't be fooled by the AR tactic. Elite police forces, better than average military forces, etc... will switch between AR and unaugmented vision every now and then, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Xagroth, even if you modify habitat AR, you don't think people have their muses monitoring their unmodified perceptions for safety purposes? That just seems like basic common sense. So even if you modify the habitat AR overlay system, you could only use it for stealth so long as you didn't trigger anything that made people's muses bring you to their attention -- a means of stealth of very limited effectiveness. You could put up an AR wall over that alley entrance, sure, and most of the time people won't notice what you've done because they'd have no reason to. Put up that same wall when someone's chasing you, though, and the muse would have a good reason to tell them there wasn't actually a wall there, so they might want to check down the alley. The individual doesn't have any need to be switching between the AR feed and normal vision; as soon as there's sufficient reason, their muse tells them. Even hacking the tacnet is only useful for sneaking around in certain circumstances -- if Mercenary A is on his own and you've hacked his PAN to feed him AR, you'll effectively fool the rest of his team since they've got nothing to compare his feed to, so you're good. If Mercenary B is seeing the same thing, then his muse is going to alert him to the object/person that one sees and the other doesn't. 'Hey boss, there's a wall straight ahead of us in A's tacnet feed, but I don't see a thing. Something's up.' Again, seems like a pretty basic security procedure. Yes, if you hacked three members of a team and not the fourth, they're all going to assume 4 is the one who's hacked, but if you've done that, they're your team anyway, so they're not a threat. I'm still not seeing how this is effective for the OP's purposes.

I thought that was what the AR Illusion software was for.

Tyrnis wrote:

Xagroth, even if you modify habitat AR, you don't think people have their muses monitoring their unmodified perceptions for safety purposes? That just seems like basic common sense. So even if you modify the habitat AR overlay system, you could only use it for stealth so long as you didn't trigger anything that made people's muses bring you to their attention -- a means of stealth of very limited effectiveness. You could put up an AR wall over that alley entrance, sure, and most of the time people won't notice what you've done because they'd have no reason to. Put up that same wall when someone's chasing you, though, and the muse would have a good reason to tell them there wasn't actually a wall there, so they might want to check down the alley. The individual doesn't have any need to be switching between the AR feed and normal vision; as soon as there's sufficient reason, their muse tells them. Even hacking the tacnet is only useful for sneaking around in certain circumstances -- if Mercenary A is on his own and you've hacked his PAN to feed him AR, you'll effectively fool the rest of his team since they've got nothing to compare his feed to, so you're good. If Mercenary B is seeing the same thing, then his muse is going to alert him to the object/person that one sees and the other doesn't. 'Hey boss, there's a wall straight ahead of us in A's tacnet feed, but I don't see a thing. Something's up.' Again, seems like a pretty basic security procedure. Yes, if you hacked three members of a team and not the fourth, they're all going to assume 4 is the one who's hacked, but if you've done that, they're your team anyway, so they're not a threat.

I'll try to chew this a little more ^^ First, people gets disoriented without the help of AR (turning the mesh off? Uh, oh... there was, precisely, a talk about that in the hecking & combat thread). So people won't be checking two different sensorial input sets. And if they did, you know all that movies where you see the heisting crew making a camera to get a prerrecorded feed all the time? Change a little part of the program so "AR view" is the same as "mesh offline" iin regards to your implanted visual illusions, and you got it, unless the bastard rips his mesh implants out, he's taken. Now, if we consider the "AR illusions are easy to distinguish from reality", making an AR illusion that cannot be gives you 80% of the job done. Then make the target's mesh to think the AR-fed items are real and... Let's add a quirk: it has been told somewhere (maybe panopticon) that habitats place AR signs everywhere, so you can make the inverse tactic: remove some of those signs from your target's AR and let him get lost, or walk to his doom believing he is just taking a walk. You wanna be a real bastard? get a copy of his muse. Reprogram it, and then change the one residing in his mesh for the modded one and watch. Tacnec hacking? Worst case scenario, you can force them to drop out of it, leveling the battlefield. In short, you don't seem to really understand how living with implanted AR means. It's the same as playing a videogame: you are at the complete mercy of what the computer screen shows you, and if a bug puts an invisible enemy, there is no option to "turn off implants and see by yourself". That is the advantage of using ectos instead of Mesh implants: take the ARglasses off, and you see the real world. Mesh implants, however, are between your eyes/ears/whatever sense you want to think of and the brain. Of course, it's easy to just shoot the target, but weren't we talking about using AR illusions? Oh, and there is also stuff called "exploits" "AR illusions" and the like in the software section of gear in the core book.

I don't think that's the case, Xagroth. The mesh inserts are not between your eyes and your brain. They're maybe between your sensors/feeds and your brain, which is totally different. You can indeed convert your 'natural' senses into feeds for the cranial computer or other people, but there's no reason to assume that there's no natural connection. It depends on 'make changes'. The book simply says you get a Perception check to disbelieve an AR illusion; if you win, you're done. If you lose, you're not aware of a change needed. If you have something cross-checking senses/sensors/feeds,… then maybe that's something different.

It seems like we have different conceptions on the inner workings of "Mesh implants" and that I'm not explaining quite clearly :S. To me, a biomorph (or even a Pod) have biological eyes that might or might not be improved (anything else and we are talking about cyberimplants). So the options for the AR is to mess inside the morph's brain... or to simply to "hijack" or click or whatever the word is the nerves, adding the AR directly to the brain's feed. In this case, hacking into the AR feeds means that neither the muse neither the ego would be able to notice any difference at all. Second option, which is the one you seem to prefer, is to havve some sort of cybernetic augmentation inside the morph's brain that can be turned off or on at will. Well, let's see how can AR be used as a weapon, with different possibilities: 1.- Hack into the habitat's AR system, modify the indications (remember: in EP you don't have street signs in the physical sense, but AR ones). Theoretically, you could make the system to send all querys from the target ID to a different feed, making him to go where you want him (for example, near a door to space...). In this case there would be NO test to know if the AR is real or not (maybe a roll if the target is familiar with the habitat to know he is going near some dangerous areas), because he would be following what he believes are legitimate indications. This would be akin to, today, mask yourself as a policeman and tell someone to use a concrete street because the main one is under repairs, having prepared some ambush there. 2.- Hack into the central processing unit of the morph and make the ego and modify the AR systems so what you want to be there as an illusion will remain on even if either of tem turn AR off, also making the muse to believe it is real. If you make the illusion real enough, then the target is quite doomed: Remember, he rolls Perception at -20 (I'd say even if he has Oracles), and he doesn't just need to suceed the roll, but to score more Margin of Success than you did. Spend more time, have some extra skills (Profession: AR decoration, for example), etc... and make it even more difficult. 3.- Hijack the target's senses. If in combat, it's quite likely he won't have time to doubt his senses. And I keep telling you, you cannot both say that people in EP suffer great stress when deprived of the AR when turning into an "autistic mode" in combat, and at the same time keep telling me here that EVERYBODY, without any reason but paranoia, keeps turning his AR off to check if what he is seeing is right or he was hacked for some obscure reason. It's like telling that, in a coin toss, you winn if it lands showing face, and I lose if it lands showing tails!

Xagroth wrote:

It seems like we have different conceptions on the inner workings of "Mesh implants" and that I'm not explaining quite clearly :S. To me, a biomorph (or even a Pod) have biological eyes that might or might not be improved (anything else and we are talking about cyberimplants). So the options for the AR is to mess inside the morph's brain... or to simply to "hijack" or click or whatever the word is the nerves, adding the AR directly to the brain's feed. In this case, hacking into the AR feeds means that neither the muse neither the ego would be able to notice any difference at all. Second option, which is the one you seem to prefer, is to havve some sort of cybernetic augmentation inside the morph's brain that can be turned off or on at will. Well, let's see how can AR be used as a weapon, with different possibilities: 1.- Hack into the habitat's AR system, modify the indications (remember: in EP you don't have street signs in the physical sense, but AR ones). Theoretically, you could make the system to send all querys from the target ID to a different feed, making him to go where you want him (for example, near a door to space...). In this case there would be NO test to know if the AR is real or not (maybe a roll if the target is familiar with the habitat to know he is going near some dangerous areas), because he would be following what he believes are legitimate indications. This would be akin to, today, mask yourself as a policeman and tell someone to use a concrete street because the main one is under repairs, having prepared some ambush there. 2.- Hack into the central processing unit of the morph and make the ego and modify the AR systems so what you want to be there as an illusion will remain on even if either of tem turn AR off, also making the muse to believe it is real. If you make the illusion real enough, then the target is quite doomed: Remember, he rolls Perception at -20 (I'd say even if he has Oracles), and he doesn't just need to suceed the roll, but to score more Margin of Success than you did. Spend more time, have some extra skills (Profession: AR decoration, for example), etc... and make it even more difficult. 3.- Hijack the target's senses. If in combat, it's quite likely he won't have time to doubt his senses. And I keep telling you, you cannot both say that people in EP suffer great stress when deprived of the AR when turning into an "autistic mode" in combat, and at the same time keep telling me here that EVERYBODY, without any reason but paranoia, keeps turning his AR off to check if what he is seeing is right or he was hacked for some obscure reason. It's like telling that, in a coin toss, you winn if it lands showing face, and I lose if it lands showing tails!

One issue I have with direct brain feed is that it's a very poor idea from a security perspective. It makes much more sense to have the muse act as a filter, in no small part because of possible attacks like we're discussing. I see AR much like any other data on the mesh -- the muse is your receptionist for the data, filtering out the parts you don't want so you never have to see it and bringing your attention to those you need to know about, or appropriately altering the image before you see it -- I want to see all AR as a ghostly image regardless of how realistic it's presented is a perfectly valid filter (note that I'm not suggesting it's a common one.) 1. This is completely legitimate use of AR hacking. You're not trying to cloak something that the person can see isn't there, you're just modifying the AR feed that your victim sees, so there's no discrepancy between AR feed and visual data for the muse to pick up on. It also doesn't circumvent existing filters that the victim has in place because you haven't hacked them. They'll see the non-physical AR street signs you post and be none the wiser, and likewise any other AR-only details. Where we seem to disagree here is how valuable implementing AR illusions like, say, putting a blank wall where a door should be. While I agree that it would fool the common passer-by, I only see that as a minor annoyance to someone who's looking, because at that point the muse is going to bring the door to their attention: [Hey boss, there's an AR wall over the door you're looking for. They must want to be left alone. If you're sure you want to go in, I'll filter it out for you.] Also note that I don't think disabling the local environment AR feed would impair your tacnet or other personal software, and at no point are you turning off the mesh, as you mention in a previous post -- all you're doing is applying a filter to what data you get from the mesh, which is something people do all the time. Granted, being forced to completely filter out the AR feed for a local area would be a major nuisance, and I don't see it as something that would be done lightly. 2 and 3. Sure, once you've hacked someone's PAN badly enough to feed them sensory data, you essentially own them. This is certainly possible, although it's very difficult to do to a prepared target in combat time, which is what the OP was asking about. Being able to pull it off generally isn't something you can count on under those circumstances, making it a very unreliable form of stealth. If you pull it off, it's awesome, but as a way to sneak up on someone or vanish from view, it's kind of like insisting on going to a brain surgeon because you bumped your head. It's overkill and frankly, more trouble than it's worth when you can just put on a chameleon cloak.

Did you mean 'Yera' when you said 'Xagroth' there? :)

Essentially, if you want to do hack someone's mesh quickly you need to make the Brute Force way, go reaaaaaal quickly to the "WIFI" control and make sure it cannot be turned off (or it will be precisely what the target will do), then play hell with them. Let me think how to phrase my thoughs... As I see the AR stuff, the usual convention is to make AR stuff intentionally easy to distinguish from reality, so making a good enough version of what you wanna show would fool almost anyone. You alll keep saying "but it is easy to catch it: the Muse can..." or "you can turn your AR off and...". I keep telling that after hacking the target, you can reprogram the muse to NOT give the advice abot the illusion you want the target to see. And to add a filter to the AR senses, so instead of being turned off they would "tune out" everything but your intended illusions. Also, please consider that Infomorphs are even more dependant from the local mesh' data. And that official LAI programs will follow the instructions from the central system (this last part is heavily based on the Dennou Coil anime). Familiar with the place: I think in Panopticon it says that everybody can get lost without the AR guiding. Personally, I'd ask for the knowledge skill of the habitat (my players, wise as they are, bought Academicism: Valles-New Shanghai. Yeah, it could be an interest, or a profession if you rephrase it as "V-NS guide", but I went with the first think I saw XD). As for the reasons behind someone making this stuff instead other simpler options, hiding is the first thing that comes to my mind. Subtle assassination, another: If to any external viewer it looks like Mark just went straight to the airlock and opened it, going into thee vacuum, then it looks like suicide instead of assassination. In short, unless you have non-cybernetic senses, you can be screwed. having a morph without any wireless connection (physically removed!), but using ectos instead allows you to make a really simple and perfect failsafe move: take the glasses off, and all mesh troubles go away.