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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."
Of course, when it fails, as all new technologies occasionally do, we'll end up with something like the American 12 soldiers that ended up taking a wrong turn and falling into the hands of Saddam as POW's.
Even the FAA sees this, as they do not allow it to be the primary navigation system on planes in the US.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Remove clothes?
This seems a bit ambitious. From what I understand the holdup in flying in the sandstorms is the fear of hitting electrical lines. Is this tech gonna provide a level of resolution that can show a powerline? No way.
A guide to the war's talking heads
tcd004
... the world is in for it..
from the wireframe-world dept:
(taken from a January 2002 SA.com article entitled, How you Know You're in the Future or something...)
Wireframe models. Everything in the future is represented by wireframe models on computers. Everything. If you're looking for a particular person, their face will appear as a wireframe model accompanied by 500-point flashing text displaying their name. If you're looking for a file, it will appear as a wireframe model of a folder. If you're looking for a wireframe model, it will appear as a wireframe model composed of really tiny wireframe models that make up each wire.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I imagine one could also remove mountains to allow remote viewing of approaching territory.
I imagine nerds removing walls to allow remote viewing of the girls locker-room.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
How is this different from adding a cheat mod to your FPS client? Transparent textures is one of the oldest tricks in the book. I think that the Geneva conventions need to be updated to prohibit this kind of thing. It just encourages campers.
Do these satellites actually detect small changes such as people and tanks?
Otherwise, why not just use a map and a laptop?
Wasn't there an article just yesterday about how cheaters were using technology to be able to see through walls? Now they can say it's OK since the military does it in real life.
I don't want that kind of realism in Counterstrike. Now all of the l4m3r5 will consider it justified since real soldiers now have wireframe mountains and buildings.
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?
"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"
Great, first we get wallhackers in Counterstrike, now the military...what's next?
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Examples:
Driving through a snow storm at night in the middle of nowhere? Overlay location info, along with roadside markings in the goggles so you KNOW where the road is and not drive into a ditch.
Driving from New York to SF for the first time? Can't read a map? Have the goggles map it all out for you connections to GPS for real time roadside updates.
Part of this technology can be used in conjunction with speech-to-text software/hardware to overlay real-time closed captioning so that I know what the damn radio DJ's are saying on my morning commute. At least Satellite radio provides the song info.
These are just some of the possibilities that I can think off the top of my head.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
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.
I also don't see much of the devlopment phase for this. Aren't real time Satellite images already availible? Isn't an iPaq strong enough to decode/decipher/function for this purpose? And aren't the Olympus EyeTrek Glassessmall enough for such a purpose?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
already done
r ica/GMA010807Xray_cameras_hunter.html
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAme
Also.. this technology seems very far away since the FAA won't allow planes with synthetic vision to get into worse weather than they currently can... FAA are movers and shakers... when they move on the product then you will see some action.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Dosn't sand shift ?
How realtime would these images be ? Personally Flying low altitude through a world that's 5 hrs old would make me nervous.
Goddamned wall-haxoring bastards!
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
"though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing"
This technology could be used for humanitarian purposes too, like staying oriented while fighting wildfires.
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."
Now if they make it so the soldiers see a wireframe world, will that mean that US troops will get kicked off battelfield servers for cheating?
GF
Lots of petrified grits
Actually, power lines are extremely simple to identify in a satellite image by looking for power poles.
The army has finally developed it's first wallhack. Now all they need is an aimbot and those n00bs they play against won't stand a chance :)
That's even better than moving and attacking with impunity under the cover of darkness (== nightvision).
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The trouble with goggles, or anything that fills a large angle of view (e.g. IMAX) is that they're compelling and immersive in a way that smaller displays can't really match. Which is great for entertainment, but potentially very dangerous in situations where the augmented stuff is not 100% trustworthy and ought to be treated with some degree of healthy scepticism. Maybe the AR overlays could be drawn in luminous flamingo pink or something, just to make damn sure you didn't forget what was what.
I remember a driver in Germany a couple of years back who drove though a couple of barriers, past several yelling workmen and into a river. All because his in-car GPS navigation was telling him that there was a completed bridge there. And that was a just a teeny little display.
(Side note: "removing" mountains sounds like a truly horrible idea. I have vivid memories of playing the excellent flight sim EF2000 - this was back in the days of software rendering when depth-buffering was still something to be avoided. So the engine just drew the terrain first, and buildings afterward, because, hey, buildings are on top of terrain, right? Unfortunately this didn't cope with occlusion, and I lost count of the number of times I crashed into a bleedin' great hill while on a bee-line for an airfield that was clearly visible right in front of me...)
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?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Hey, wait a minute, weren't we just complaining about this in yesterday's thread about people cheating by using the wireframe views to track and kill there enemies? Sheez, do we ever learn. F--ing Noobs. -Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
Even if we can "see" through a sandstorm by means of this goggle, can the planes handle it? I've always thought that jet engines need streams of clean and particle-free cold air in order to run....This technology can probably work through dense fog and rain, but personally I think sandstorm is pushing it a bit too far.
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?
anywhere near the ladies's shower on base, right?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I know this can be useful for long range projections (in the sense of conjectures, not projectiles, though maybe them too), but is a mountain really the first thing you want to be removing when you can't see ten feet ahead?
But seriously, what good is seeing through mountains when you can't NOCLIP?
We Are Familiar With Elephants By Virtue Of Their Size.
If I type 'noclip' in the console, will this let me walk through walls? If so... I want one! :)
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.