We have all seen some of those sci-fi thrillers on the big screen. Movies like Terminator or the Matrix give us glimpses of how battles might be waged many years from now. Did you ever think though that perhaps it is not as far in the future as you might think? Well if you keep up on US Military innovation, you would know that those images we see in movie theatres may well be out on the real life battlefield, protecting our young men and women very shortly. Well that is if the folks at the Pentagon have anything to say about it.
A few days ago, the Pentagon and its inventive wing if you will DARPA, unveiled some of this space age technology in the form of the SCENICC. SCENICC stands for Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras and the Terminator has nothing on this equipment. Imagine our military having the ability to wear a helmet that gives them vision of up to a full kilometer away and provide it in a 360 degree span of vision. You have heard the term eyes in the back of your head? Well this is the real thing.
However when one starts to consider it, you would think that this kind of thing can’t be too practical for a fast moving soldier who has to be light on their feet. This system must weigh at least twenty pounds right? Actually the whole thing weighs no more than eight pounds and is literally an eyepiece system that fits on the soldier’s helmet. The whole thing would be a hands free operation that would be maneuvered via a type of voice recognition type setup that would do things like focus for its user when given a pre-determined command. It is said that with the use of the device, a soldier’s vision has 10x zoom, not just in one eye, but both.
The abilities of this system would only get more extraordinary from there. Citing part of a CNN report on the system, the following specs are part of the standard things that DARPA wants the system to give a soldier the ability to have: “high-resolution computer-enhanced imagery as well as task-specific non-image data products such as mission data overlays, threat warnings/alerts, targeting assistance, muzzle flash detection, projectile tracking, object recognition/labeling, and get this, an integrated weapon sighting function that locks their gun on your target when acquired”. Arnold could only have wished to have all that in the movies!
The battery unit, though small and very lightweight, gives its user over twenty four hours of usage time. Too bad we can’t get that kind of technology in a cell phone battery, eh? You can see where that would be needed by people out in the field that might not be around electricity and the like for quite a bit of time. The other great thing about this system would be that it is not just setup for the singular soldier. No it would have the capability to be networked with other soldiers in an effort to provide views from all members of a team as well as those being pumped down from those drone type devices we hear so much about from the battlefield.
It truly is remarkable what human beings are able to accomplish on a daily basis and this is just another example of these wondrous inventions that are making things easier for our men and women in uniform. It gives them an edge when taking on some of these other armies and terrorists groups that are not equipped with this latest technology and can be a real asset in trying to bring peace to the world.
