Omega Tech Expo News! Breaking Technology!

Cross-Linked from Tech4TheMasses

Good morning/afternoon/evening, wherever you may be, and welcome to T4TM’s live coverage of the annual Omega Tech Expo! We’ve got some great stories and showcases coming your way from our wide-eyed crew of interns, who’ve spent the last six hours exploring every nook and cranny of this demo floor looking for the best and brightest upcoming gadgets, gizmos, and revolutionary innovations!

Now, as you may not be aware, this is the first major tech expo since the Reaper War, and we were all expecting to see some truly spectacular breakthroughs as a result of the galaxy being overrun by technologically superior elder gods. It’s also the first expo of this kind to be held on Omega in which any major Citadel corporations and research groups are participating, which gives it a scale and scope not many others can hope to match. We certainly haven’t been disappointed! By following the various links scattered throughout this feed, you can read more about any mentioned technology and in many cases see recorded demonstrations straight from the floor! Whether you’re looking for the latest repulsor tech, new and innovative hardsuit designs, the latest revolutions in FTL engine manufacturing, or just a frying pan that won’t burn your pancakes, T4TM’s coverage of the OTE is the place to be! For now, keep your eyes glued to that monitor, we have an interview coming up with one of the more remarkable independents at the show!

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[Ankhryptor] Hello hello everybody, this is Ankhryptor coming to you from the independent floor, where I’ve secured some very valuable time with TechOptryx, who’s here with some really amazing nanotech. Tell us a little more about it, Techie.

[TechOptryx] Uh, Ankhryptor? That’s seriously- oh, you’re using a screen name. Okay, uh, don’t do that for me – screen names aren’t really meant for publicity and %^&$, especially if you’re going to call me ‘Techie’. I mean, seriously, I do not like that at all. I’m Jil’Korah, Jil for short. As for the tech… Well, it’s uh, surprisingly simple. Basically I took some nanobots and developed a network interface that lets them share and collate information.

[Ankhryptor] So while I obviously know exactly what that means and understand the staggering implications, mind clearing it up a bit for our less-savvy viewers?

[Jil] Um. Okay… Sticking to strictly what I’m displaying here today, these are nanocameras. Each one is so small that it can only take in a tiny bit of information, which is why nanocameras typically suck. They’ve been tried a few times but the hardware is limited and the picture is usually grainy and horrible and so on and so on because it’s hard to include both a camera and a transmitter and the processing power to comprehend what’s going on. What my network interface does is it lets each nanobot work within its own limitations, then collects the data and forms it into a cohesive whole, so uh, you can actually get something useful out of it.

[Ankhryptor] Ohhhhhhh.

[Jil] Yeah. So you can unleash a cloud of nanocams and within seconds have a complete three-dimensional image of a space, and since there’s millions of them it’ll be fully detailed and the network design keeps that up-to-date. Then you can pair that with a basic VI – say for security work, if you need to monitor an area – a VI to record and keep track of who/what’s in a room at a given time. Lots of other applications, of course… I developed it for my own scavenger work, since you don’t always know what a wreck looks like on the inside and while I love my mapping drones, they’re basically limited to areas you can get into yourself anyways.

[Ankhryptor] That seems useful, but it doesn’t really touch on the staggering implications, does it? I mean, since word got out about this stuff you’ve had all sorts of visitors here at the show, and I practically had to beat them back with a stick just to get this interview.

[Jil] I was wondering how you got here, ‘Ankhryptor’. Anyways, yeah, lots of interest from lots of different people – strictly sticking to the nanocam functionality, which is baseline compared to what’s possible, there’s been a lot of interest from the medical field and, of course, security, which is why I used that as an example. Those’re both interested because it could integrate with their existing systems pretty much flawlessly thanks to the type of data it’s outputting, but the really interesting stuff comes in when you factor in that this interface seriously increases the processing power available to individual nanobots, a bit like cloud computing, which is kinda funny because they’d usually be distributed in something like a cloud, I guess?

[Ankhryptor] Hahahahahah, classic.

[Jil] (silence)

[Ankhryptor] So what are some of the other potential uses?

[Jil] Well, if you swap the camera functionality out for other tech, almost anything. Simple sensors take up less space, and the beauty of the network interface is that it’ll work on any kind of nanobot and you can program in the variables. One idea I’ve been toying with myself is self-repairing armor, since you could punch the envirosuit specs into the VI running the network and it’d use nanobots to maintain those wherever possible, which is actually a bit similar to some of the potential medical applications beyond just diagnosis – like, you could inject a bunch of nanobots and they’d clear out someone’s lungs of contaminants or whatever, all based on a VI telling them what it’s supposed to look like in there. It’d potentially work on almost anything, though obviously that’s a long way off.

[Ankhryptor] No way.

[Jil] …What network did you say you were with again, ‘Ankhryptor’? You’re one of their regular correspondents, yes?

[Ankhryptor] T4TM, Tech 4 The Masses. And I will be after this!

[Jil] Uh, sure. Anyways, since the obvious next question is about what kind of setbacks I expect, I’ll go ahead and pretend you asked that. Biggest issue is nanoreplication – nanotech is tightly controlled in Citadel space and parts of the Terminus, so there’s not a lot of facilities around that can produce a ton of them for multipurpose stuff. I uh, have a source, which I can’t reveal for legal reasons, but unless there’s some change in the laws, this stuff will stay on the fringe of acceptability until the benefits outweigh the risks.

[Ankhryptor] Risks? What kind of risks?

[Jil] Okay seriously, you’re an intern, stop interrupting. Nanotech is risky because they’re microscopic and hard to detect unless you’re looking for them specifically, and they’re easy to weaponize. Thing is, everybody who wants to weaponize them already can or has – the Hegemony did it, and so far as we know they didn’t use it to destroy any planets, and there are enough warlords and arms dealers sitting on old batarian stockpiles that these things are out there and available and given that, there’s no point denying ourselves the advantages they could bring, right?

[Ankhryptor] (silence)

[Jil] You should be asking a followup question.

[Ankhryptor] Oh, uh, right. Sooooooo… What about like, power sources?

[Jil] Good question. Seriously, no sarcasm at all, good question. There’s a few basic approaches, all of which require the laws on nanotech to be lightened. Nanobots die pretty quickly if they’re running on internal power because that power source is by definition tiny. You can prevent that by having them draw power from their environment somehow – make them out of an energy-absorbent material for example and they could last indefinitely just on ambient. That gets expensive though and by definition you need millions or billions – probably trillions – of these things to accomplish anything really cool so it’s pricy. Second option is to invest lots of time and money into finding a better internal power source. Tried eezo, it doesn’t work, for the record, so skip that one. Third option, best by far, is to constantly refresh the supply of nanobots, gets around the power issue entirely. I can’t get into how to do this since it’d probably count as aiding and abetting terrorism or forbidden technology or some such, but economy of scale would make that tech available if, again, they lightened the restrictions on nanotech.

[Ankhryptor] Wow. Well uh, I think that’s all my questions answered? So we’re going to head to another exhibit to see what’s on display. Thanks for your time, Techie!

[Jil] I told you not to call me that you-[Feed Ends]

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Join us here on T4TM next time for an exclusive look at that frying pan, and don’t miss the rest of our exclusive coverage from the Omega Tech Expo!

Mmmmmmm. And I suppose the potential for you to end up in a room with a group of grateful, scantily clad women is, what, incidental to the whole affair? All that boobage is purely hypothetical?

But anyway.

Question: how well can the swarm based gestalt and hardware be applied to, say, industrial fabrication or realtime fractal pattern growth? I'm thinking solids, possibly liquid-stage components here.

Hey now, there's nothing wrong with appreciating someone else's art while I work on my own.

Industrial fabrication tends to be large-scale and generally isn't what this sort of thing is used for - they'd hypothetically work but it wouldn't be very efficient since you'd have to figure out how to power the nanobots or install nanobot fabricators so you can fabricate while you fabricate. Easier to skip a step unless it's a specific type of device that requires micromanipulation to a degree beyond the capabilities of standard industrial fabricators.

Real-time fractal growth is a lot easier. You'd just need to program the network interface, upload the schematic of what's developing, and the nanobots would provide a framework. In this case you wouldn't need to worry about fabricating more beyond the initial batch since they'd basically just be moving into place. Even if they die where they are, they're still in place and providing the framework which is what you really need, and 'newcomers' will recognize that and just keep building on it.

I wonder if they are still working on that teleporter they showed on DDS. Remembe how it vaporized some salarian? "I FUCKING LOVE SCI-" BOOM!

Excellent, I've talked to Tanna Fal at the studio, and sent you a PM with the basics - give him a call to discuss the fine details, it's basically just local licensing and intellectual property and all the usual Illium bureaucratic trivia. Hope to see you sometime!

Medical applications sound interesting (actually, let me talk to our people in the office here, see what they have to say about it re: clean-tech), although not really a pressing need - EP like any proper porn studio has full dedicated medical hardware on set, scans as part of prep for every scene, all the usual precautions. Sounds like something that might make for an interesting art piece, but I don't know that anybody in a porn frame of mind is interested in seeing my capillaries. :)

Well, maybe that's because I asked about the applications relevant to me in my first post, while you thought it was more important to waste time until the second page rambling on, again, about how disappointing we all are to you.

By the by, next time I've got a camera rig and the spare time, I'll create something themed around being hosed down with icy water. Thanks for contributing. :)

And now I'm sad. Fair's fair though, it doesn't strike me as a tool particularly suited to a great deal of ah "heavy lifting" as it were. Though....

hrm.

You see I'm in a bit of a predicament here. On the one hand I have a hypothetical idea regarding the power issue. On the other hand I don't like talking to the engineering staff ever since they took the money I was saving for my dinner at Guozhi Yang's, locked me in a closet, and called me an undegreed looser.

They're mean okay? Engineers are mean.

And now I'm happy again! The trick would be in finding something you would actually want propagated but...well foams for one could be a viable alternative. Fire suppression and chemical treatment. Nonlethal restraints. Emergency sealant.

Hrm.

I'll confess that high grade nano-engineering is not precisely my specialty (so kindly pardon any inadvertent stupidity on my part and rectify as you see fit). Buuuut I am decidedly intrigued.

Well I'm sorry, I only have so much bile to go around and today's been a busy busy day. If you'd like to be addressed promptly and personally I'm afraid you're either going to need to be especially egregious or pay a premium upfront.

Mmmm watching pornstars get hypothermia. That's exactly my fetish, how did you know?