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Wearable PC with an Artificial-Reality Helmet
Roland Piquepaille writes "In this short article, InformationWeek writes that 'two sexy technologies that flamed out five years ago -- wearable computers and artificial reality -- are combined in a new training-development system' for the military. This system, developed by Quantum3D, includes a binocular head-mounted OLED display and head-leg-weapon motion-tracking systems, integrated with a vest-worn tactical visual computer. It runs under Windows XP and is compatible with the 802.11 a/b/g wireless networking standards. It will be used by the infantry to train soldiers, but it looks so complex that I would need intensive training just for using it. Read more for other details and an illustration of the full scary system."
Ok, I'm not as religous a microsoft hater as many here, but is there ANY good reason to have this run on XP?
-1, Roland
Why don't WE have VR helmets yet? It's been almost 15 years since the primitive arcade ones appeared and yet here we are in 2005 and still nothing.
This sucks!
this isn't for a soccer mom or surfing the net in the food court while the wife is shopping. Its for soldiers, people who are used to carrying around 100 pounds of equipment. I don't think this is going to be that much of a bother for them.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Your brain comes with one.
As much as I do not like Piquepaille's articles appearing ever so often, I cannot understand why you need to keep complaining about it. If you do not like them, just ignore them. As simple as that.
Atleast some of his articles are vaguely interesting and refer to something or the other you're probably unaware of. Don't like them? Don't read them. As simple as that.
It's interesting to that a number of manufacturers are putting out glowing press releases about their involvement with this, including Transmeta. There's a bit more information on Transmeta's site about the actual specs of the wearable system itself.
And, yes, it can run Linux.
Absolutely. Relying on wireless communication for troops just needs the enemy to use a little bit of interference to obselete the system. Relying on HUD identification depends on a lack of simple EMG weapons.
I suspect that part of the training is to confuse games with reality. There's a distinct tactical advantage with having soldiers who forget that when you die, you don't respawn...
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
Building HMDs is not rocket science. Back in the early 90s (when I did this kind of research) we used LCD displays purloined from the new portable TVs that were coming on to the market. Sega used 2 320x240 displays (left and right). The focusing system for the eyes (so you don't need to wear glasses, which you can't with most HMDs) is very similar to what you might find in a pair of binoculars. Add an orientation sensor (yaw pitch roll) and that's really just about it. Oh, and you may want a pair of headphones.
;-)
Seriously, this isn't rocket science. We manufactured test HMDs in my garage for a year and a half, using off-the-shelf components. That said, my focal plane can now do things that are downright unnatural - because we used some very odd lensing stages which, well, didn't always work perfectly.
But again, these things really aren't safe for any sort of extended use. 20 minutes, a few times a week, is all that anyone could really hope to tolerate without producing unpleasant side-effects.
All things considered, I think that heads-up displays are far better, because they only add to the real world, rather than substituting something for it. That's where I'd like to see this sort of development go.
Was reading this interesting article today on the extent to which military recruiters are invading high schools and community colleges.
Anyone still in school who can confirm this is what's its like today?
- Military recruiters in the lunch room on a daily basis
- Guest military speakers in classrooms
- Army and Marine recruiting ads mandatory viewing in classrooms
- Recruiters telling kids to stay out of college and go in to the military instead because then college is free and you will be able to get jobs once you get out of the military and not if you go straight to college.
- Do recruiters disproportionately target the poor and minorties
That has to be great for American competitiveness and the economy when your own government is trying to dissuade kids from going to college in order to prop up sagging recruitment.
Rumsefeld and General Meyers(Chairman Joint Chiefs) were in front of Congress this week and grilled about the fact that the Army and Marin reserves and guard are now officially missing their recruiting goals. Meyers rationalized one reason is because the Army and Marines were doing such a good job of retaining soldiers there aren't veterans going in to the guard and reserves. I think he forgot to mention a prime retention tool is stop loss which prevents people from leaving the military when their enlistment is over.
Meyers other proposed solution was hire even more recruiters to hunt down young people and trick them in to the military.
It will be interesting, if the Bush administration will have to either:
- Start bailing on Iraq
- Refrain from starting new wars in Syria and Iran
- Restart the draft and commit political suicide
- If they do restart the draft what kind of dodges will they provide for rich, white kids like George W. had in the Air National Guard, trained at great expense to be a pilot and no chance of ever seeing combat and for the most part didn't even report for duty.
Probably should write a long post about the goal of the military to use video games and simulations to train children to be soldiers and to desensitize them to the consequences of being in a war where people are being killed and you might be killed. Computers are god to the military for that. Has anyone seen a video simulation or game showing dogs eating dead bodies and dragging of limbs, or maybe dead women and children, or people burned half way to charcoal. We really need more of that in video games, actual war footage so kids learn that war is not clean, tidy and heroic. Its brutal, ugly and horrific and lots of innocent people die. If you are a pilot it might not entirely register when you drop bombs you are killing people, often innocent people, but if you end up in the Army and Marines, you may be killing people close up, and one of two things will probably happen:
- You will regret it for the rest of your life
- You will start liking it and start doing it at every opportunity, and not be very discriminating in who you kill. In Vietnam it was apparently common for some people in this class to start taking pictures of their kills, building scrapbooks so they could revel in their handwork later.
@de_machina
This is ridiculous... why aren't the editors kicking this guy out??? but then again, at least he's honest sorta about himself... other sneaky types probably are pushing their own ad revenue by making their submissions with a pseudonym slashdot account
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I would rather have a clear plastic panel that covers my eye, and have a projected image hit it. So that the display was transparent, and when not in use, could be looked through with ease... This would also go well when you start writing the display software to overlay map information with what your eye see, so looking with your left eye, you see all real world terrain as you normally would, through your right eye, you see the real world terrain, with computer generated graphics laid on top of that terrain, highlighting known object, friends, targets, etc.
The closest visually I have seen to this device is the (useless) HUD used in Hackers, the mid-1990s movie. Most consumer HUDs are far too bulky. These really need to be near sunglass weight on the ears/nose/neck, even if they feed of a small PDA strapped to your hip.
It's the "Woodlands" theme from this guy's site: http://www.bryanbell.com/radioThemes/
He says anyone is welcome to use the themes, or to adapt them for other weblogs (Roland Piquepaille runs Radio UserLand, which the theme was originally for, and Groklaw runs GeekLog).