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."

Comments

That's great.

[FreeLinux]

All this fancy tech stuff is great. But, if you watch the news right now, you'll see that this fancy schmancy stuff isn't terribly helpful when you are burried in a sand strom or up to your hips in mud and bullets are zinging every which way.

There's a time for tech. But, there are always going to be times when nothing will take the place of simple brute force.

Where's my sledge hammer?

Re:Civilian uses

[Surak]

I think you'd be more likely to see this kind of stuff in a HUD on a windshield, rather than goggles. Remember that consumers are little more picky about comfort and style than the military is. :)

Also, I'm sure you will see this developed for civilians. Lots of military technology eventually ends up in the hands of civilians, albeit a bit stripped down or otherwise modified with consumer preferences and safety in mind. Examples include, of course, GPS, various off-road vehicle technologies, cell phones (yep, originally developed for the military), the Internet itself, spread-spectrum wireless technology, the list just goes on and on...

Bottom line: if someone can make a buck off of military-developed technology, they will. :)

I can see wartime problems with this

[SolemnDragon]

OK. Realising that it's still in development...

First, if you can't see where your fellow soldiers are, you're looking at a wireframe model of a world that you can't shoot into. How do you know where our guys are? This isn't a redundant post, because i need to add

Second, if you add GPS for all our folks into the picture, all the enemy needs to do is take one set of goggles and kaboom! there go our troops.

That said, i agree with the point that these are adding to the trivialisation of wartime 'kills' and the overlap of technology and wargames. But this has been coming for a long time, from way back in the world of 'duckhunt.' (which was pretty advanced itself, all things considered...) Hurt my spine in an accident one year, though, spent hours learnign to shoot those stupid ducks. Do i now look upon animated ducks with a dispassionate urge to blow them away? No. But that's not quite the same as human to human violence on the box. (PETA, leave me alone: it's NOT the same, and doesn't have the same effect. We can argue that one out when the US goes to war against waterfowl.)

So tell me: does anyone else think of the ad for the - what was it, navy seals, is army, that has the war game with the kids being beat to shreds by some mystery troup, and it turns out that it's real US forces playing the war game against them? Frankly, i think that the US forces are using this marketing tool badly- they are smudging that line just as far and as fast as they can. But sooner or later, the kids who sign up get to find out that it's not a game.

Realising that i've digressed from my original point: It's a catch-22. Put nobody else in the picture, all you have is a big sign saying 'you are here' on a digitised map. Good for sandstorms but won't tell you whether the guy hiding behind the wall up ahead is your buddy or your foe, and if you put in stuff that tells you this- you open the door for all those foes to know where your buddies are when they take you and your nifty goggles too. What's an army to do?