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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 !
-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)
Having XP in the background gives you something to blame for all the 'friendly fire'. Hey, I'd believe it!
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!
"Ok, I'm not as religous a microsoft hater as many here, but is there ANY good reason to have this run on XP?"
Since TFA wasn't all that informational I'm going to take a guess and say:
1) The military primarly uses Windows (Yes, I know there are exceptions....)
2) On a system like this I'd imagine a GUI-centric OS is essential, and face it...Windows does this better than Linux. (Note: don't confuse this statement with anything even close to the word 'stability')
3) In the event of a crash, I suspect on a system like this it's easier to hit the reboot button; rather than dumping the user to a Linux CLI where they have to have some access to a keyboard to restart whatever failed; whereas with Windows it's point-and-click.
Of course...these are entirely my opinions and I'm sure there are going to be plenty of Linux users to come along and attempt to shoot holes through them.
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.
There's a difference. "Virtual" reality is synthesized in the helmet, immersing the soldier's senses, responding "just like" reality to their reactions. "Artificial" reality is synthesized in a press conference, immersing the society's senses, responding "just like" reality to its reactions. The virtual one never exists materially, while the artificial one is thrown up all around us - but don't peek behind the scaffolds.
--
make install -not war
Windows might have an edge over Linux for an immersive 3D environment simply because more video cards support it. Doing a good 3D environment with information overlays is a complex problem and most of the work that I've seen done has been UNIX/OpenGL based.
In the event of a crash you'll know you're running Windows. If your crappy linux video driver causes a kernel panic, it's just as easy to hit reset on Linux as it is on Windows. Especially if you use one of the journaled filesystems that have been built into the OS for the past 5 years or so now.
Anyway, I'd be surprised if the entire reason Windows was chosen over any other OS was due to the contractor's familiarity with it and possibly because they're a "Microsoft Partner." Whether it's the best, cheapest or most secure option they could have chosen probably didn't even enter the equasion.
The military's not as fickle as the public. If you build a Windows based PVR that has to cost $30 more than a Linux based PVR due to the Windows license, most people will go for the linux based one, all other features being equal. The military will choose and pay for whatever their contractor bids out for them, no questions asked.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"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
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!
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
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.
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.
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.