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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."
Welcome to the Borg !
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
From the article:
It runs under Windows XP and is compatible with the 802.11 a/b/g wireless networking standards.
Let the flaming begin.
After having worked with ubiquitous computing for a while, I can tell you one thing -- that thing is too big and has very bad affordances for it to take off big time.
On the other hand, look at something that folks like Thad Starner or Steve Mann come up with - better affordances.
(Mann actually had a different helmet design and changed to the Eye-tap design)
Blue screen of literal death.
This sounds like a crutch for good, realistic training. From the short article, which leaves a lot of questions in my head:
Quantum3D Inc., which bills itself as a visual-computing vendor, has announced the availability of the Expedition, a combination wearable computer and artificial-reality gear. The Expedition's target market is developers of so-called immersive training. Their products, in turn, are used to train armed services personnel and emergency-response workers.
Hmm.. it sounds bulky and cumbersome. Are soldiers really running around with a wearable VR gear - no, they aren't (at least not the line troops).
Now, I have limited military experience (some basic training and basic courses), but I happen to know that these troops are going to have a crapload of equipment and this will just add an extremely unrealistic element to their training exercise.
Besides, it will be unreliable and probably add a lot of time to various training exercises. I'm not saying it'll be unreliable just because of Windows XP (although it won't help matters.. BSOD in the middle of an exercise?), but because soldiers tend to crash around heavily with their equipment - and equipment, however sensitive, tends to be broken by technically inept people.
Looks cool, but I'm sure it will take a few million tax dollars to do an evaluation of this machine by Quantum3D and discover the flaws.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Aren't our soldiers already getting too much "virtual" training before we send them to places like Iraq, so huge percentages are coming back with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
--
make install -not war
Counter-Strike? Oh yeah.
Wasn't there recently a Slashdot story about people confusing reality with games? Nearly every comment suggested that gamers had that experience at least once... even with Tetris! I think this technology will can that to a whole new level.
Maybe we ought to have a game where you hunt for Osama Bin Laden and then let loose an army of 17 year olds into Tora Bora.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
They are training the soldiers to pat their head, rub their tummies and wiggle their toes simultaneously to reboot.
Great, now instead of shooting at our troops, our enemies can simply attack them with viruses and spyware!
God help us
Looking at the description and the name of the manufacturer, it is interesting to recall that in the history of early CD-ROM videogames, "Quantum Gate" was a "season" of so-called "interactive movies" (VirtualCinema by HyperBole Studios) featuring the idea of VR overlay being (ab)used to turn the actual "soft" targets into something ugly the soldiers would no longer hesitate to shoot.
"Hello I'm Clippy. You'll go where I go, eat who I eat and bother who I bother" =)
I think the patent office may have something to say about this; Steve Jobs has had an Artificial-Reality Helmet for some years now.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I'm glad that hasn't happened ye--oh wait...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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."
If you read the small print on the bottom of Q3D's picture of the Explorer you will see "Soldier not included". You need someone else to operate it after you pay an arm and a leg for it.
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.
Windows XP, AND 802.11* networking? How long until the first soldiers are scarred for life by goatse beamed directly into their helmet?
The Helmet is a VERY good thing, IMHO.
After all, something needs to protect your head when you keep walking into things because you're staring at a COMPUTER SCREEN instead of the sidewalk.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The fact that he has 'accessories' kit or the fact that the caption says "Soldier not included".
Back in the early 1990s I started a company designing consumer VR ware for video games. We did lots of design work, got a few patents (hardware) on our work, then got a big contract from Sega to design key portions of their Virtua VR system - which was an HMD (head-mounted display, the real name for these things) that would plug into the Sega Genesis system to give you full immersion into the game playing world. We worked out all of the technical details, got the prices on the parts down to where it could sell for about $199 retail, and sat back and waited, and waited, and waited. Then Sega killed the project. We never heard from Sega why they killed the project. But, a year later, I heard a lecture from some researchers at SRI, who had done the testing for this helmet on Sega's behalf. Sega wouldn't allow them to release the results, so they did the tests again - on their own dime - and released them. And here's why you won't be wearing an HMD anytime soon:
1) Binocular dysphoria: when you wear a stereo HMD, your eyes/brain are getting one clue for depth perception (parallax) whereas in reality, there are six different cues for depth perception (focus plane, shadowing, etc) which your eye/brain uses to sort out what's going on in the z-plane of reality. While you're in the HMD, the brain adapts to this. Trouble is, when you take the HMD off, your brain is _still_ adapted to this. Now your brain eventually goes back to normal, but this takes some time, and it varies from individual to individual along a bell-curve distribution. Some people come back almost immediately. Others come back very slowly. That is an enormous problem if you go out and get into a car right away, or - as would be the case with the kids using the Virtua VR - getting onto a bike, walking down stairs, etc.
2) Torque: The Virtua VR was, like most early VR HMDs, closer to Darth Vader's helmet than to a pair of eyeglasses. That puts pressure onto the neck, and the neck can't really handle more weight than the head's already putting on it. Adding weight adds a lot of torque to the neck's movements, resulting in much more frequent neck strain.
3) Barfogenics: Although computers are more than fast enough to update images at 30 fps (even the Genesis could do this), the sensors which are used to calculate the yaw/pitch/roll of the head - in order to keep the image aligned with your proprioceptive sense of where your head is - generally don't work nearly as quickly. Most cheaper tracking systems, the kinds you'd find in consumer electronics, have some hysteresis associated with them. And that's bad, because if the image lags the movement by more than 50 msec, almost everyone will end up getting motion sickness. (Technically, this is known as "simulator sickness".) But the sensitivity of people to simulator sickness is also distributed on a bell-curve. Some folks get it very quickly, others don't get it at all.
So there you have it: Sega was told that they'd be selling a device that would cause kids to ruin their depth perception, would give them neck sprains, and would make them puke. Sega didn't even want to think about those kinds of lawsuits...
Today HMDs are lighter, but these fundamental issues remain, and remain unresolved. Yes, you can use optical tracking these days, because comupters are much faster with optical processing, but it's difficult to set up. HMDs are lighter, but they're still bad for your eye/brain. And until those problems get resolved, don't expect to be putting your head into an HMD.
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.
Hello. I notice you're attempting to assymilate or eliminate deverse species into your race. It seems like youj're writing a letter...
whenever you encounter a company with the word "quantum" in its name, and you ask yourself why, you should always keep in mind one thing
Nobody would surrender to the dread pirate Westley
-- Avishalom is usually vish
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.
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.
A Man-Wearable PC with an Artificial-Reality Helmet
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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...
Here is how InformationWeek describes the system.
Quantum3D Inc., which bills itself as a visual-computing vendor, has announced the availability of the Expedition, a combination wearable computer and artificial-reality gear. The Expedition's target market is developers of so-called immersive training. Their products, in turn, are used to train armed services personnel and emergency-response workers.
Among the components are a binocular head-mounted display and head-leg-weapon motion-tracking system by eMagin, and Quantum3D's Thermite tactical visual computer that's worn on a vest. Together, the components are designed to give the wearer accurate simulations of fabricated situations, including visuals, surround sound, and voice command.
http://www.primidi.com/images/wearable_expedition
The above illustration shows all the components of the Expedition. (Credit: Quantum3D Inc.) It comes from this datasheet (PDF format, 2 pages, 901 KB), which includes a description of the realtime visual system -- but please keep in mind that it comes from the company which wants to sell the Expedition.
The Quantum3D THERMITE Tactical Visual Computer features a man-wearable, light weight, small form factor, superrugged, sealed alloy enclosure with Mil-Spec connectors and conduction cooling that brings the performance and application compatibility of mobile PC workstations to deployed operations in hostile environments. The onboard NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200 Mobile GPU with 64 MB of frame buffer memory delivers industry-leading image quality and graphics performance.
The eMagin binocular OLED head mounted display (HMD) technology is used in Expedition's primary viewing device and provides a 40 degree diagonal field of view and 1.44 megapixels per 24-bit color SVGA microdisplay. With a 200:1 contrast ratio, patented OLED-on-silicon technology to enhance refresh rates, and on-chip signal processing and data buffering, the HMD provides bright, crisp, and flicker-free stereovision capability.
Quantum3D offers slightly more information in this press release, but doesn't provide a price for the Expedition system.
Sources: Jim Nash, InformationWeek, February 16, 2005; Quantum3D website
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
i thought the most interesting thing is that 800x600 oled hmd displays are coming (finally) vs. the currently on market 640x480. of course, how long it takes for the emagin unit to make it into consumer-available (and affordable) technology remains to be seen.
No they don't. As far as optical systems go they are pretty poor; chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, they aren't even close to the theoretical performance for an optical system with an objective that size. Human eyes have of the order of 1 arcminute resolution.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.
The former Soviet bloc had more troops than us, China has WAY more troops than us, both match us in tanks bombs and artillery, so we needed to develop better stuff than them. To a large degree this has paid off, although the amount of money spent has been tremendous. But things like GPS guided bombs, stealth aircraft and high tech command-and-control systems do give our troops an advantage.
Even though the military does do stupid things on occasion, give them some credit. If a system is truly unwieldy and flops miserably during testing, it won't get adopted for field use. The fact that they're constantly looking at new high tech stuff, trying to find something useful, means that they will have lot of flops too. But one thing you can say about U.S. military for sure - they're not stagnant.
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).
What is the difference in approach with your kit and say Steve Manns? Admittantly your system is commercial consumer grade where constraints of market and production play a big part in releasing product. But Manns research and production into wearable computers (wearcomp: tapping into his right eye) has been around for ages.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I think the real nice thing is that this is a recent instance of an HMD using OLEDs instead of LCD or CRT devices. That is the real story on it...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon