Retrojective Goggles (RAR!)

[Zor]

In this scenario a new product has hit the market: Retrojective Goggles.

A set of Retrojective Goggles look like a set of iPod styled VR goggles with a visor in the front, a USP port and dial on the side, but they don't simulate reality. What does this amazing product do? Why they let you look into the past!

To explain how this works, you walk into a room with a pair of retroactive goggles, turn them on in the default position, you will be able see in front of you as normal. But if you turn the nob back, your point of view will Retroject back in time to that location (automatically correcting for planetary rotation, the earth's orbit, the sun's orbit around the galactic core thanks to earth's gravity well and complicated physics). You can't EFFECT anything in the past, but you can observe it. You can see yourself walk into the room, the rooms previous occupants and similar. You can not use this machine to project a view into the future because the future has not happened yet. After about 32 hours things get fuzzy, after 64 hours everything is black. The goggles can record video and take picture. Each set of goggles costs $500.

What happens?

Zor

[madd0ct0r]

can you watch the past in fast forward, or only in realtime?

[Zor]

can you watch the past in fast forward, or only in realtime?

In real time, unless you are really steady in turning the nob forward.

Zor

[Darth Tanner]

Hiding the body of murder victims for at least 64 hours becomes very important. Indeed making sure no one even starts backtracking their movements for 64 hours is vital too.

People (other than exhibitionists) stop having sex in hotel rooms.
All police officers get a pair for pretty much their entire day job.
Vandalism, theft, assault, indeed pretty much all open crimes are not impossible to get away with except where police manpower is insufficient to catch them all.
Toilets becomes dangerous places to wear goggles.
No government documents are allowed out of secured areas at all - if a government minister is reading a document on a train you can go back in time and read it without anyone knowing without having to even approach him.
Road accidents become easier to appoint responsibility over.
People don't lose their keys so much.
Cinemas have great problems with people watching the wrong film.
Youtube explodes with people doing things they used to get away with.
Gays/lesbians can now wank off to watching themselves wank off yesterday. Indeed depending how you reaching out and touching a past image would react (ie like holograms) you can essentially have sex with yourself.

[madd0ct0r]

I dunno Tanner - CCTV matches most of those uses and still dosen't eliminate them. (sorry Zor if I just undermined the point)

[Darth Tanner]

Yeah but CCTV only points where there is a camera and only from its fixed angle - usually with very poor image quality.

With these you can find any crime scene (empty shelf where product used to be/broken window/beaten up victim/spilt milk) and get as close to them as you like, from any angle you like - even if their hiding their face you can just follow them home or see their face once they take off their hood. Hell if they open their wallet at any point you can read what their id says.

The only limitation is having a police officer with the time to do the time goggling.

The only way to avoid the goggling is to wander around for 64 hours before and after committing a crime and wear a balaclava for the whole period.

[Borgholio]

Shame it's only 60 hours or so. If you could look back indefinitely, you would be able to directly observe the construction of the Pyramids, see what Jesus really looked like, even view dinosaurs in their natural living environment.

[Darth Tanner]

It would be brilliant to have unlimited history view range... you could literally view any scene from history you chose, meet any historical figure. All you would need is to travel to somewhere you knew they went.

First stop Cairo to see the pyramids when newly built.
Second stop... Waterloo?

[bilateralrope]

People (other than exhibitionists) stop having sex in hotel rooms.

Or they decide that they don't care if some stranger knows that they had sex. Or they just turn off the lights.

No government documents are allowed out of secured areas at all - if a government minister is reading a document on a train you can go back in time and read it without anyone knowing without having to even approach him.

How hard would it be to make sure that their documents are carried in darkness in all wavelengths these goggles can observe ?

Because if they are in darkness, the goggles will only see darkness. But if the container is transparent enough to have light inside, the goggles can peak inside it.

Cinemas have great problems with people watching the wrong film.

I see nothing about sound in Zor's description. Only video.

can you watch the past in fast forward, or only in realtime?

In real time, unless you are really steady in turning the nob forward.

Zor

Or you build a machine to turn the nob at the speed you want. I'm expecting pause to be more useful than fast forwards.

[Darmalus]

Replace knob with computer control. Set it to go backwards at one second per second and you can observe a slice of time that has been frozen.
Combine that with a high speed camera, rapidly go through the whole time viewing range and record everything for detailed review later.

No where is private unless you can control access at all times. Changing rooms, toilets, even private areas that can be observed through a window.

We would have to rapidly replace passwords with biometrics. I could stick my head through where you chest is now in the future and watch you type from an inch away, even record it in slow-mo. Ever pull your credit card out at a restaurant or store? I have all your information now.

This would also be a massive boon for scientific research for all the same reasons. See what's going on inside a sealed chamber by moving the chamber aside or entering it afterwards.

If we can hack the universal motion compensator, no where is private ever since we can now observe anything anywhere within the last 2 days.

A world without even the possibility of privacy except being too boring to bother watching would be hard to get used too.

[Simon_Jester]

No government documents are allowed out of secured areas at all - if a government minister is reading a document on a train you can go back in time and read it without anyone knowing without having to even approach him.

How hard would it be to make sure that their documents are carried in darkness in all wavelengths these goggles can observe ?

You can carry them, but you can't open them. So for all practical purposes, no taking the documents out of secured areas except as a 'courier' thing. Then again, that's pretty much already the policy I suspect, but it'd be a bigger deal now because it's harder to ensure confidentiality.

Incidentally this raises a HUGE problem with things like computer passwords, because I can use the goggles to watch you type your password. I can even watch you do it repeatedly until I get it right.

[Me2005]

No where is private unless you can control access at all times. Changing rooms, toilets, even private areas that can be observed through a window.

Emphasis added

This is an interesting point - how many places can you get to that would let you violate someone's privacy within the 64 hour window? My computers are all locked inside my home, so to get my passwords you'd need to get into my place or get near enough to see in, though I'll grant that smartphone-users might have trouble. Someone standing *right outside my window,* where they'd need to be to see what I'm doing, would be bound to draw suspicion.

But there is another portion of that that'd depend on how the device works - can you use it to see through and behind things, or does it clip or show blackness/nothing? If I'm standing in the street and a past-car drives through me, what do I see when I'm in solid blocks of material? What do I see when I'm in places that are closed, but not absolutely black with darkness? If you can see in my wallet and know how much cash I've got or my credit card info when I'm wearing it and it is closed, security and privacy may well just go out the window unless we all decide to become hermits.

[Zixinus]

It will be possible to adept. Credit cards will use fingerprints or temporary-passwords to function. Same will go for office security: fingerprint scanners are already common and are more secure than passwords anyway. Vocal passwords will be out because they can be recorded. The change will only be more expensive really. At best other security measures, especially ones that control physical access, would need to be more thorough too.

People living in houses and apartments will remain largely unaffected, except perhaps it becoming more important to have distorting curtains (curtains that let light in but you can't see through from outside, dunnu what they are called in English) or even one-way windows.

One important change will be journalistic. Reporters will get accurate views of what happened in certain locations. This can be a bit of a bad thing but it can also be a good thing, because it will decide "he said, she said" events. It may be bad in that such journalists will become indiscriminate in what they show or even become overly reliant on these.

The police are going to have problems with this too. If they have, say, a case where privacy of certain individuals are vital, this thing is going to be problematic. On the other hand, this thing can shatter the usual blue wall of denial that can crop up: police officers actions can and probably will be monitored even after what they have done. Police will have yet another, if more direct, source of constant scrutiny of their everyday jobs of course.

[Elheru Aran]

One issue with stealing passwords, papers, etc: First you have to actually get into the place where they are. If you don't have authorization to be there three days after the information is out in the open, it's not really going to do you any good.

So I would expect intelligence services to suddenly become very involved in convincing/turning people in government offices, military bases, etc, to smuggle goggles in. That kind of thing.

I would also expect there to be serious involvement in adapting this technology to be able to use in different devices, such as cameras, so that you can actually record the past scene rather than have to use the goggles. This would be more useful in some ways-- if you could miniaturize a past-viewer into something the size of a typical digital camera, that's a lot easier to sneak into places versus something the size of an Oculus Rift headset. The only trick would be teaching people how to use the thing-- turn it on, move through the screens until you're where you need to be, and take the picture.

[Simon_Jester]

It will be possible to adept. Credit cards will use fingerprints or temporary-passwords to function. Same will go for office security: fingerprint scanners are already common and are more secure than passwords anyway. Vocal passwords will be out because they can be recorded.

Voiceprint analysis might be in, though, because the retrojective goggles don't record sound. You could read someone's lips, but that won't allow you to reconstruct the sound accurately enough to fool a voiceprint analyzer. Or if it did, I suspect the relevant hardware would be more trouble than it's worth to steal the average person's computer password.

[Darmalus]

As far as passwords I was more concerned with laptops, desktops have the advantage that you can just lock the door and block the window unless you are in a cube farm or something. I was more imagining someone just grabs your laptop then backtracks you to a starbucks or something and watches you input your password there. I've worked for the government, I know how stupidly insecure our laptops are even without time goggles.

[bilateralrope]

Credit cards will use fingerprints or temporary-passwords to function.

Here's a simpler solution for credit cards: Remove the visible number from the card. Which isn't used for the most part anyway.

That is assuming anyone tries to steal credit card numbers via goggles, instead of just phising for them like they do now.

Why do you think thieves will use the goggles over phishing ?
Goggles require the thief to go to somewhere where the credit card was removed from the wallet. Security cameras then become a problem for the thief. Which only gets worse if they are trying to steal multiple credit card numbers.

Phishing does not require the thief to go where their victims have been.

[Zixinus]

Here's a simpler solution for credit cards: Remove the visible number from the card. Which isn't used for the most part anyway.

Oh, of course. Credit cards use chips. I was thinking that when I pay with my credit card I have to enter a PIN number in the credit-card reader for it to work. That's what I think will be replaced.

[bilateralrope]

Only if people use the goggles to steal credit card numbers. Why do you think thieves will try to use the goggles instead of using one of the phishing attacks that works today ?

What advantage do the goggles give the thief over a phishing attack ?

[Starglider]

There is absolutely no way the 'motion compensator' hardware will not be hacked. So this is effectively a telescope to observe any event in your 64 hour past light cone. The real-time applications of that are arguably more important than the historical applications; it is an unblockable/unjammable means to observe or communicate with any point in the solar system. For military and intelligence purposes that makes all stealth and most subterfuge almost impossible. Almost all radar and sonar can be replaced with unjammable unlimited range volumetric scanning (with only the scanned volume limited by the number of sensors and the refresh rate). The NSA etc can set up arrays of millions of these things rapid scanning all areas of interest, tailing suspects and running vision recognition to alert humans of events of interest. Staying in the dark won't help much because the technology will almost certainly pass IR and likely the whole EM spectrum (it would be very strange if the effective transmission window was just the human visual range). If it is a slow fade in effectiveness then for recent past low-light night vision will likely work fine as well. Regardless journalists and voyeurs will have unlimited potential to effectively abolish privacy. Governments will try to ban civillian ownership, with success determined by how difficult it is to build (i.e. if it can be prevented by cutting off supply of a vital component). If they fail the space industry will take a huge hit, as satellites will no longer be needed for sensing or communications. On the plus side intrasolar astronomy will get a huge benefit; even the rest of astronomy will benefit hugely from the ease of constructing very long baseline arrays and easy instant 40 light hour baseline parallax measurements. Even the mundane application of a cheap effective remote high-res 3D scanner (for objects, people and architecture) will have a significant impact; constructing an accurate VR representation of the entire earth will be practical.

This exact scenario (although with a longer historical cut-off) was explored in depth in the sci-fi novel 'The Light of Other Days', by Stephen Baxter, touching on many of the things I just mentioned.

[Simon_Jester]

So THAT's the name of the novel! I'd been giving myself a headache trying to remember it...

[Zixinus]

What advantage do the goggles give the thief over a phishing attack ?

Nothing, but leaving things as is could still allow a goggle-user to see all the numbers on my credit card already and thus zero it to the bone buying god-knows-what.
If such a thing came out I wouldn't even carry my own bank card with me until a goggle-safe one could be made. Hell, I probably would disable by bank card as soon as I saw confirmation about the news just to be sure.

The thing about security cameras is that they usually only save the footage if the owners/operators know that a crime possibly was recorded. Otherwise security camera footage isn't saved forever. There is usually a 24-to-72-hourish delay. So if a goggle-user comes around during the night and they only use the acquired card numbers after a few days, there will be no evidence.

Sure, phishing is probably better but this is something you can do just by acquiring the thing and without any previous criminal skill.

[Elheru Aran]

What do you think security guys and other people are going to do if they see someone just standing around with a pair of these goggles on, though? Stand there and let them do anything they want?

Somehow I don't think that will be the case. Very likely a protocol will emerge where to officially use the goggles, you have to show the person in charge wherever you're wanting to use them an official ID to prove your bonafides.

Of course ID forgery will probably boom thanks to this.

[Zixinus]

Who said that you have to use the goggles when a security guard is there? Or even at a place where there is a security guard?

[Borgholio]

Who said that you have to use the goggles when a security guard is there? Or even at a place where there is a security guard?

You could use the goggles to observe and record the patrol paths of the guards, when they switch shifts, and even individual habits of the guards themselves. Make it easier to get past them.