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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the blurring-the-lines-of-reality dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Depending on where you rest your hat, the words "AR battle" could mean some very different things. You might still be hankering to have your Pikachu rain down lightning on a friends' Squirtle in Pokemon Go, or, if you're recovering from the iPhone X launch, be wondering when you'll be able to send your mini troops into a tabletop augmented reality warzone in Directive Games' The Machines.

But if you're among the thousands in attendance at the Defence and Security Equipment International 2017 (DSEI) conference at London's Excel Centre, those battles and warzones in question become altogether more real. As, while the consumer world waits patiently for the giants of Cupertino to lift the covers off the rumored Apple AR glasses, the military has been dabbling in augmented reality interfaces for years.

The transparent nature of AR glasses lets the wearer maintain situational and environmental awareness.

What was once the reserve of fighter pilots, the advances of Moore's Law means that impressive heads-up display units will soon be standard issue for regular ground troops. Through the use of wearable glasses and headsets, key data points will be overlaid onto a battlefield – everything from mapping information to mission parameters to markers defining the movements of allied troops and enemy forces.

Topographical data can be relayed to a troop along with video feeds from remote overhead drones or fellow forces elsewhere on the field. All the while, the transparent nature of AR glasses (as opposed to the all-encompassing view of a virtual reality headset) lets the wearer maintain situational and environmental awareness. The potential chaos of what's going on around a soldier can still be seen and actioned upon.

[...] It may be troubling to consider troops offloading too much thought to computer systems when lives are at stake – what if a sensor has failed, and an innocent bystander rather than an enemy has been highlighted as an aggressor? But the key element here is that the troop retains agency as to how to act upon the information presented to them in AR, rather than handing it off to an automated system. All the while, AR equipment will be reducing data that would once have been displayed on multiple screens into one portable, wearable device.

"A commander can filter the information he needs from the battle management system, and he can basically add flags, pinpointing each little pixel representing a key position in the real world," adds Peder Sjölund, Head of New Technologies, BAE Systems Hägglunds.

"By reducing cognitive load, we're expecting to see stress levels go down, with automatic target recognition letting crew members filter out 90% or more of uninteresting information, giving them just what's interesting in that moment."

[...] Whether packaged as a peacekeeping tool (BAE also envisions different software systems for commercial industries such as aviation, and for rescue services such as firefighters) or highlighted as the machinery of war that it is, it can be difficult to swallow that the same fundamental technology powering your Snapchat stickers will play a part in life-or-death decision making in conflict zones. But it does highlight the versatility of augmented reality applications – and why perhaps the hype in this case will be justified by a wearable computing revolution to come.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by zeigerpuppy on Friday September 22 2017, @01:56AM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Friday September 22 2017, @01:56AM (#571522)

    maybe if we considered spending 1/10 of the money spent on military on humanitarian causes; we would't need to be creating super-soldiers. I can't help but look at all this military waste as death porn peddled by scared little boys. Time for us to grow up as a species and learn the lessons of globalism; what goes around, comes around.

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