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Norway Is Gamifying Warfare By Driving Tanks With Oculus Rift
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Look at Norway, where the Army has started using Oculus Rift to drive tanks with increased visibility, according to the Norwegian TV station tu.no. Four VR cameras are mounted on the sides of the tank to give the soldier inside donning the headset a full 360 degree view of what's going on outside, like X-ray vision. Using cameras to 'see through' a vehicle isn't a new concept; when the hatches are down tanks are notoriously hard to navigate. But the Oculus Rift dev kit is just a fraction of the price of traditional 360-degree camera equipment: Lockheed Martin's F-35 helmet for pilots can cost tens of thousands of dollars."
It refers to turning something that would otherwise be uninteresting into a game in order to make it more interesting for participants.
Maybe the F35 flies faster than a tank and needs a stricter latency.
With sufficient thrust, the tank flies just fine
"Gamify" is such an ugly neologism, even in the situations it was coined to cover (ie. the ones where a non-game task is dressed up in game-style features by some means), that it really should be taken out and shot. In this case, they aren't even 'gamifying'. They're just experimenting with COTS gear as a, presumably cheaper, presentation system for the stitched-together output of the exterior cameras. That doesn't make the situation somehow more game-like.
There's that, and the F-35 helmets do far more than just a visual display. They're engineered to keep the pilot's noggin safe(OR is not), they keep the pilot oxygenated in high G turns(OR does not), and it's highly integrated with the F35's avionics(OR is not).
There are good reasons a pilot's helmet costs more than a thousand $$$.
Union requirement.
Rules are rules.
No brain, no pain.
As a former M1A1 tank driver I would not want this system at all. I don't need something extra that can go wrong and leave me blind at the wrong time. Imagine yanking all that crap off just to be able to see again. Give it to the commander and let him play with the toy but he'll set it aside I'm sure.
Tanks are not all that hard to navigate. Plus you're not suppose to get tanks into positions where you have those sorts of problems. If you do then you have the rest of your platoon to help be your eyes. As well as "scratch your back" if you need it.