Aloy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
despitethenora) wrote2023-06-05 12:02 am
despitethenora) wrote2023-06-05 12:02 am
Entry tags:
Focus
To be short, the Focus is somewhere between an all-purpose mobile device and a tricorder. The technology of Aloy’s world developed in a direction that assumed everyone had one, much like we have quickly come to assume everyone has a smart phone in their pocket. As such, it acts as a sort of universal user interface. In fact, to quote wiki: “Boasting over 200,000 apps covering music, fashion, navigation, the Nepit update also refined biometrics for monitoring health and finding lost pets, to assisting in diagnosing and repairing household appliances.”
The Focus is a small metal triangle with a dim line of light down the center when active; one holds it near the side of one’s head, and it will simply fix itself just in front of the ear, as though holding a magnet near metal.
Now, the Focus is an augmented reality device - audio and visual output are in the user’s head; only another person with compatible technology will see and hear what the user does. When placed, it automatically activates with a sound the user will hear. It projects a spherical grid of purple lines around the user, and Focus users can tell that someone’s got an active Focus because a ring of light will appear projected over the Focus. In Aloy’s world, it will automatically project interfaces with technology that’s around - for example, going into old world ruins, it will show door controls, computer displays and so on.
There’s not a lot of tech lying around snek for that.
BUT ANYWAY.
Functionality: DATA STORAGE AND ACCESS.
You can run around downloading, storing, and playing with files. Aloy, for example, is canonically into the open world exploration and datapoint collection: she can scan old devices, download the files on it, and read text/listen to audio/watch holograms from them.
Interfacing with another device is intuitive; touch your Focus to activate it, and focus your attention on the device.
The sequel pretty much says to assume that if there was a datapoint in an installment, ASSUME SHE DOWNLOADED IT. For example, she can find datapoints that tell the story of a couple women who were coworkers and had an amateur metal band. One of these datapoints is a recording of their final song together. And then Aloy starts getting a gang together and sharing Focuses with them, and. Well. This completely optional datapoint comes back with a vengeance.
Again, when you have a Focus you do get to see what they’re working with/hear the audio. Varl has strong opinions about having to hear that song all the time.
Note that datapoints are not all tech-based. Aloy also scans written letters, for example.
PLEASE HAVE AS MUCH OR AS LITTLE DATA AS YOU WANT. Aloy is very free with data, but that can potentially turn into an ‘oops, you’re looking everything up now’ situation. For Tryse, she is at least loading the Focus with sci-fi environmental reclamation and agricultural data, due to their discussions of reclaiming Sunken Albion and making it livable again.
If desired, this is a collection of the datapoints in both games. At this time, Aloy is pre-Burning Shores and has no Burning Shores datapoints.
This is a list of the first game’s canonical Metal Flower poetry; I’m headcanoning that Aloy has collected a lot more poetry in her travels since. Generally, the theme should be something related to nature, especially plants (it is, after all, being spread by an AI subroutine dedicated to plants).
When viewing holograms, they are typically shown as semi-translucent lights, in blue or purple shades.
(If desired, one may discover that the first hologram Aloy ever collected, and the most played file in her collection, is “Happy Birthday, Isaac!” It was her comfort video for many, many years and she must never live it down.)
Canonically, the Focus is just constantly recording; multiple people have simply downloaded data from Aloy’s Focus and used it to review her experiences. (Such as Beta saying she went over it, and commenting on how Rost treated Aloy as a father figure.) THIS is probably data that shouldn’t be on there, just because at that point you just end up having to be canon familiar.
Make your own files as well; Aloy’s running around making task lists, and we know Beta wrote a final message to Aloy, and wrote sort of a diary about her sister going to the Burning Shores, etc.
Functionality: Phone and video calls
What it says on the tin. Aloy knows how to network her Focus to someone else’s, and communicate, either as a regular audio call or with a hologram of the person on the other end. This is pretty redundant with the game’s phone but the perk is you don’t have to be handling the phone and there’s potential to place some more subtle calls when needed.
It IS possible to do spyware to eavesdrop, but Aloy doesn’t know how so. Yeah.
Functionality: Text-based auto-translate
We see that the Focus automatically translates languages into English. Literally, the various tribe's glyphs have translations projected over them; Aloy can run around scanning letters written by different cultures and read them all. We see that Aloy is able to get the Focus to actually teach her to read English; perhaps it was an app projecting a word over objects and when she says the correct word it changes the projected text to a green to show it was right. It's likely she was able to use such apps to get the education that she has (she's able to surprise people with what she knows because she would spend her nights as a kid pouring through information on the Focus, and I'm sure she continues to do so as an adult. She knows the world is round. She can explain DNA to someone else.)
Functionality: Second Sight
Aloy gains a reputation for having the ~second sight~ because the Focus scans and highlights things for her. She has to be actively using the Focus for this, touching it and slowing down her movement. However, once she’s pinged things with the Focus, it can be set to continue displaying things.
Interestingly, even as we start distributing Focuses to Aloy’s allies and start seeing a tribe that found some of their own (the Quen), canon still treats Aloy as pretty much the only person using the Focus like this. It may be a matter of, as Aloy has suggested to Tryse, the usefulness of the Focus depending on your creativity and resourcefulness. Maybe it’s because she’s been using her Focus as a machine hunter since she’s been six, and the others haven’t.
-Resources: In the second game, this literally works like pinging a radar. You touch the Focus, it shows you a circle of light expanding over the ground, and it puts triangles over things that could be useful - do you want to get a rock? Some sticks to make arrow shafts? Some medicinal herbs? A machine carcass to salvage?
-Tracking: Aloy cheats at tracking. The Focus will highlight blood, disturbances in foliage and dirt, damage to structures and objects. She can have it highlight tracks for her and then let it continue doing this passively while she concentrates on moving around and fighting and whatever. When it does, it can even project holograms predicting the posture of the subject being tracked.
If something is moving on a predictable route (ie patrolling), you can tell it to highlight that track. This is how she saves a Nora boy when she was a kid.
Aloy DOES use this to find noteworthy things for “investigating.”
-Highlight targets: It's always important to scan a new enemy, according to Aloy. You can find points to target for critical damage, things that you want to break to disable enemy attacks, etc. If you hit this spot with fire, it’ll go boom? And so on. Maybe there’s just a straight-up elemental vulnerability. For a short period after actively scanning a machine, it’ll maintain lights highlighting good spots to shoot at; you can tell it to actively keep parts highlighted, and then it’ll keep those spots highlighted purple without needing to re-up the scan. MOSTLY this is just a machine thing, but you might scan the environment to find your environmental hazards (log traps HI ADORA, or your typical shoot-the-barrel-for-fire) or to spot something a human enemy is carrying (THIS enemy is carrying a gun; THAT enemy has a blaze canister that you could shoot; THE OTHER enemy has a hard light shield on hand). It will actually highlight living organisms in purple, making it easy to spot human enemies even in the dark, or easy to find game when hunting for something to eat.
You can also TAG people, machines, and animals; unlike the above, doing this has the Focus place a little arrow about the tagged individual’s head. This makes it easier to keep track of targets when there’s a lot of movement, when they might blend in to the environment, etc. THIS DOES NOT PENETRATE STEALTH EFFECTS. If someone is tagged and ducks into some weeds, you can keep track of them with the tag; if someone is tagged and activates a stealth cloak or casts an invisibility spell, the Focus loses them. (There are invisible enemies in canon, and you fight them with attention to detail. Or fast reflexes.)
-Wallhacks: Technically the games let Aloy “see” through walls but I’m just going to pretend that’s not there in snek. (Like oh, there’s some enemies waiting in the next room? Oops, already saw them. Could be a problem.)
The Focus is a small metal triangle with a dim line of light down the center when active; one holds it near the side of one’s head, and it will simply fix itself just in front of the ear, as though holding a magnet near metal.
Now, the Focus is an augmented reality device - audio and visual output are in the user’s head; only another person with compatible technology will see and hear what the user does. When placed, it automatically activates with a sound the user will hear. It projects a spherical grid of purple lines around the user, and Focus users can tell that someone’s got an active Focus because a ring of light will appear projected over the Focus. In Aloy’s world, it will automatically project interfaces with technology that’s around - for example, going into old world ruins, it will show door controls, computer displays and so on.
There’s not a lot of tech lying around snek for that.
BUT ANYWAY.
Functionality: DATA STORAGE AND ACCESS.
You can run around downloading, storing, and playing with files. Aloy, for example, is canonically into the open world exploration and datapoint collection: she can scan old devices, download the files on it, and read text/listen to audio/watch holograms from them.
Interfacing with another device is intuitive; touch your Focus to activate it, and focus your attention on the device.
The sequel pretty much says to assume that if there was a datapoint in an installment, ASSUME SHE DOWNLOADED IT. For example, she can find datapoints that tell the story of a couple women who were coworkers and had an amateur metal band. One of these datapoints is a recording of their final song together. And then Aloy starts getting a gang together and sharing Focuses with them, and. Well. This completely optional datapoint comes back with a vengeance.
Again, when you have a Focus you do get to see what they’re working with/hear the audio. Varl has strong opinions about having to hear that song all the time.
Note that datapoints are not all tech-based. Aloy also scans written letters, for example.
PLEASE HAVE AS MUCH OR AS LITTLE DATA AS YOU WANT. Aloy is very free with data, but that can potentially turn into an ‘oops, you’re looking everything up now’ situation. For Tryse, she is at least loading the Focus with sci-fi environmental reclamation and agricultural data, due to their discussions of reclaiming Sunken Albion and making it livable again.
If desired, this is a collection of the datapoints in both games. At this time, Aloy is pre-Burning Shores and has no Burning Shores datapoints.
This is a list of the first game’s canonical Metal Flower poetry; I’m headcanoning that Aloy has collected a lot more poetry in her travels since. Generally, the theme should be something related to nature, especially plants (it is, after all, being spread by an AI subroutine dedicated to plants).
When viewing holograms, they are typically shown as semi-translucent lights, in blue or purple shades.
(If desired, one may discover that the first hologram Aloy ever collected, and the most played file in her collection, is “Happy Birthday, Isaac!” It was her comfort video for many, many years and she must never live it down.)
Canonically, the Focus is just constantly recording; multiple people have simply downloaded data from Aloy’s Focus and used it to review her experiences. (Such as Beta saying she went over it, and commenting on how Rost treated Aloy as a father figure.) THIS is probably data that shouldn’t be on there, just because at that point you just end up having to be canon familiar.
Make your own files as well; Aloy’s running around making task lists, and we know Beta wrote a final message to Aloy, and wrote sort of a diary about her sister going to the Burning Shores, etc.
Functionality: Phone and video calls
What it says on the tin. Aloy knows how to network her Focus to someone else’s, and communicate, either as a regular audio call or with a hologram of the person on the other end. This is pretty redundant with the game’s phone but the perk is you don’t have to be handling the phone and there’s potential to place some more subtle calls when needed.
It IS possible to do spyware to eavesdrop, but Aloy doesn’t know how so. Yeah.
Functionality: Text-based auto-translate
We see that the Focus automatically translates languages into English. Literally, the various tribe's glyphs have translations projected over them; Aloy can run around scanning letters written by different cultures and read them all. We see that Aloy is able to get the Focus to actually teach her to read English; perhaps it was an app projecting a word over objects and when she says the correct word it changes the projected text to a green to show it was right. It's likely she was able to use such apps to get the education that she has (she's able to surprise people with what she knows because she would spend her nights as a kid pouring through information on the Focus, and I'm sure she continues to do so as an adult. She knows the world is round. She can explain DNA to someone else.)
Functionality: Second Sight
Aloy gains a reputation for having the ~second sight~ because the Focus scans and highlights things for her. She has to be actively using the Focus for this, touching it and slowing down her movement. However, once she’s pinged things with the Focus, it can be set to continue displaying things.
Interestingly, even as we start distributing Focuses to Aloy’s allies and start seeing a tribe that found some of their own (the Quen), canon still treats Aloy as pretty much the only person using the Focus like this. It may be a matter of, as Aloy has suggested to Tryse, the usefulness of the Focus depending on your creativity and resourcefulness. Maybe it’s because she’s been using her Focus as a machine hunter since she’s been six, and the others haven’t.
-Resources: In the second game, this literally works like pinging a radar. You touch the Focus, it shows you a circle of light expanding over the ground, and it puts triangles over things that could be useful - do you want to get a rock? Some sticks to make arrow shafts? Some medicinal herbs? A machine carcass to salvage?
-Tracking: Aloy cheats at tracking. The Focus will highlight blood, disturbances in foliage and dirt, damage to structures and objects. She can have it highlight tracks for her and then let it continue doing this passively while she concentrates on moving around and fighting and whatever. When it does, it can even project holograms predicting the posture of the subject being tracked.
If something is moving on a predictable route (ie patrolling), you can tell it to highlight that track. This is how she saves a Nora boy when she was a kid.
Aloy DOES use this to find noteworthy things for “investigating.”
-Highlight targets: It's always important to scan a new enemy, according to Aloy. You can find points to target for critical damage, things that you want to break to disable enemy attacks, etc. If you hit this spot with fire, it’ll go boom? And so on. Maybe there’s just a straight-up elemental vulnerability. For a short period after actively scanning a machine, it’ll maintain lights highlighting good spots to shoot at; you can tell it to actively keep parts highlighted, and then it’ll keep those spots highlighted purple without needing to re-up the scan. MOSTLY this is just a machine thing, but you might scan the environment to find your environmental hazards (log traps HI ADORA, or your typical shoot-the-barrel-for-fire) or to spot something a human enemy is carrying (THIS enemy is carrying a gun; THAT enemy has a blaze canister that you could shoot; THE OTHER enemy has a hard light shield on hand). It will actually highlight living organisms in purple, making it easy to spot human enemies even in the dark, or easy to find game when hunting for something to eat.
You can also TAG people, machines, and animals; unlike the above, doing this has the Focus place a little arrow about the tagged individual’s head. This makes it easier to keep track of targets when there’s a lot of movement, when they might blend in to the environment, etc. THIS DOES NOT PENETRATE STEALTH EFFECTS. If someone is tagged and ducks into some weeds, you can keep track of them with the tag; if someone is tagged and activates a stealth cloak or casts an invisibility spell, the Focus loses them. (There are invisible enemies in canon, and you fight them with attention to detail. Or fast reflexes.)
-Wallhacks: Technically the games let Aloy “see” through walls but I’m just going to pretend that’s not there in snek. (Like oh, there’s some enemies waiting in the next room? Oops, already saw them. Could be a problem.)