Augmented Reality for the military

Hi All,

3DP's push into military applications has been given a bit more reasoning and detail (potentially) in this morning's Economist (Science ed). With a US$20b+ contract, that little tech coy, Microsoft, is swinging hard at field wearable AR with lidar a key system. The need for instanteneous visually assisted perimeter/situational analytics is obvious yet impossible without lidar. Maybe 3DP's new "...just Faster" branding is code for "no battlefield latency".

"ARis the art of superimposing computer graphics on a view of the real world. It is popular in applications ranging from video games to selling furniture. America’s army would like tactical intelligence pertinent to a soldier’s mission to pop up similarly on a transparent visor attached to his helmet, no hands required. And for this capability, it is spending big. In March it announced a deal with Microsoft to build such a system. This could, over the course of a decade, cost a staggering $21.9bn.

The army has dubbed the kit IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System). David Marra, who runs Microsoft’s end of the project, describes it as a holographic computer. The displays produced, he says, appear “locked to the real world”, even as a wearer moves and shifts gaze.

IVAS pulls off this wizardry by crunching and synthesising several types of data. A GPS receiver locates the wearer within centimetres. Instruments fitted with accelerometers and gyroscopes provide information on how he is moving around. Cameras track eye movements. IVAS must also be aware of a soldier’s environment. This relies on lidar, an optical equivalent of radar. An array of sensors record the time it takes infrared laser pulses bounced off nearby objects to return. That allows those objects’ distances to be calculated. Machine-vision software that recognises those objects then keeps track of how they move. Mr Marra describes the process as a “continuous rendering of the xyz co-ordinates of everything”."

The reality is that any military contracts for 3DP may be a ways off, but the military will definitely be huge creators and consumers of 3D data sets and analytics. 3DP's hat is in that amazing, "just faster" ring.

Cheers,