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Synthetic Vision
oniony writes "Ars Technica has a link to a story on new goggles being developed for/by the military. The new device uses satellite imaging and land profiling to build a 3D representation of the world in a soldier's goggles in real-time. This would enable troops to see through sand storms and oil smoke of the kind currently hampering operations in the Gulf. I imagine one could also remove mountains to allow remote viewing of approaching territory."
and I'ts been worked on for the past 10 years by Steve Mann.
www.wearcam.org is a good place to start.
He is developing the cyper enhanced reality to specifically remove advertisments from the real world.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It seems like what they've done here is take something similar to that system, match it with the positional gunsite system the Longbow uses to aim it's chain gun, and created a conformal HUD display. All in all very cool. I'm sure the next step is to put all this on a Predator and just leave the pilot sitting in the relative comfort of base camp. The military will start recruiting at CPL events.
As a side note, the inspiration for our system came from a true story. It turns out that a vast majority of plane crashes throughout the world come from what avionics people clinically call CFIT. That's Controlled Flight Into Terrain. Basically it means some moron pilot flew the damn thing into a mountain. Well, in the mountains in Chile some regional airline pilot was flying between two peaks when he receives a course correction from ATC. Visibility is low so he's flying almost entirely by instrumentation. Well he makes a correction in his flight computer for what he believes to be his next waypoint. The problem is he accidentally makes the correction for his _previous_ waypoint. So, following his orders, the plan prompltly goes into a hard turn to head on back to the new waypoint which is now behind him. Before he can figure out what was happening *kaboom* the plane becomes a permenant feature of the local terrain.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
The J-STARS ground surveillance system is designed to use radar to detect and track slow moving or semi-fixed land targets like vehicles and relay the information to ground units. The system consists of aircraft with high energy radar and advanced signal processing combined with ground stations to receive the information.
Combined with a 3-D map of the battlefield, the location and movements of enemy forces beyond visual range would be a powerful asset. Even if it's as simple as a "red area" on the map to show pilots where *not* to go, that's a huge value. Assuming the system could be extended to ground troops, this type of information could make a huge difference in, e.g., urban areas where troops can't see past the buildings around them. I can think of plenty of Special Forces applications.
Imagine having a monocular on your non-dominant eye showing you a wireframe map of a city in both 2-D and 3-D space with estimated locations/movement of enemy units so you can navigate without making contact. The National Imaging and Mapping Agency has quietly been acquiring and processing high-res 3-D maps of most of the Earth, so it looks like we're well on the way to a totally geographic-aware force.