m-meanie baka-senpai
urasai urasai urasai ;-;
Okay. LORE DUMP TIME:
Neuro Linkers: Personal computers installed on the neck that hook into the brain. When turned on, they allow one to use one's area of vision as a desktop on a normal computer, and work as normal computers, complete with word processors, video and music playback and Internet. One can access a Virtual Reality, which is more akin to games like Second Life, where one has a Virtual Avatar (not a Duel Avatar, that's only in Brain Burst) where you can talk to people and play various games like virtual tennis and virtual shooting. Neuro Linkers can also be linked with cables for a wired connection and a private chat, as well as exchanging programs (like Brain Burst) and files, but tends to be used either between relatives or lovers due to how intimate it is and the fact that you're more or less hooking a cable into the other person's brain with yours.
Thus Kotaro and Midori exclusively use very short wires- In terms of Brain Burst, a wired connection allows for a temporary private server and a private match, as well as being used to exchange Armaments. For instance, if Kotaro and Ruy were to use a wired connection, they could trade Copper Haze's Wind-Cutter Guard for Azul Crusader's Colada and Tizona. They could do this in a normal game, but this is far less likely to get people's attention. It's also faster.
- There were older devices, such as a chip implanted into the brain that served the same function as a Neuro Linker (and the same helmet that they used in SAO for VR, I forget its name), but they've been superseded.
Changes brought by Neuro Linkers: More or less, everything. It made it possible to have a computer on you at all times, no matter what. Information constantly accessed. You could install it on a newborn baby, and thus have them grow up with it. Indeed, nowadays you need a Neuro Linker to do much of anything within urban areas; outside places like Neo Tokyo, you'll still find places where they do things the old fashioned way.
Augmented Reality: Outside of Brain Burst and the virtual reality servers, this tends to be pretty much nonexistent or somewhat nonintrusive.
-Within Brain Burst (and thus while Accelerated), an hour equates to a second in the real world. Thus, in the real world, day-long fights in Brain Burst can be resolved in a matter of seconds. As a side effect, Burst Linkers who have been playing for a long time are far older mentally than they are physically.
-Virtual Reality outside Brain Burst, however, is NOT subject to the same altered time perception. Not that you'd spend much time there, anyway. (Which is good because the anime and the light novels don't say much about it
)