Holoband

The Holoband was a Caprican device that immersed its wearer in V-World, the vast shared virtual reality of the Twelve Colonies in the era before the Cylon War. Widely used across Caprica, it was also condemned by religious groups as a symbol of cultural decadence, and its licensing made a fortune for Graystone Industries even as the technology became entangled with the rise of the Cylons.

V-World#

The Holoband was worn over the eyes and projected its user into V-World, a shared virtual reality in which people could meet, play games, and explore spaces that did not exist in the waking world. Among the young it was a place of recreation and transgression alike: Zoe Graystone and her friends Lacy Rand and Ben Stark met there regularly, at first using exploits to slip into its virtual sex clubs. A user left the experience simply by removing the device, an act that caused their avatar to "de-rez" from the virtual setting, which made the Holoband a ready tool for surveillance, disguise, and escape in the intrigues of Caprican society.

A maligned technology#

For all its popularity, the Holoband was widely condemned. The Monotheist Soldiers of the One, which had turned from terrorism toward peaceful methods, developed hostile views toward the technology, seeing it as driving cultural decadence, and Zoe herself came to regard V-World as a symbol of that decay after her companion's conversion. The licensing of the Holoband was enormously lucrative but heavily criticized, and Daniel Graystone at one point publicly promised that Graystone Industries would no longer profit from it and would establish a charitable fund instead.

Link to the Cylons#

The Holoband and the V-World it opened were bound up with the origin of the Cylons. It was within that virtual reality that Zoe Graystone built the program capable of recreating a person's consciousness as a digital avatar, and the copy she made of herself, the first such avatar, became the intelligence that animated the first Cylon. In later years the machines themselves entered V-World in their off-hours to practice their Monotheist faith, so that the technology meant as entertainment became one of the threads leading to the Cylon War.