DARPA’s ULTRA-Vis Augments Reality For Foot Troops

[MADem]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/05/darpas-wearable-display-augments-reality-for-foot-troops/

PENTAGON: After 20 years of unsuccessful efforts to produce a wearable display to provide foot troops digital data without blocking their view of the real world around them, DARPA has invented one called ULTRA-Vis.

“The prototype was completed within the past several months. The breakthrough [was] the holographic wave guide” program manager Yiftach Eisenberg told me as he displayed an admittedly clunky demonstration model at this afternoon’s “DARPA Demo Day” in the Pentagon courtyard.

Yes, he said “holographic,” but no, the wearer doesn’t see a three-dimensional image hovering in front of him like Princess Leia in Star Wars asking Obi Wan for help. The holographic wave guide is a system of channels etched into high-tech coatings on the glass. Those channels convey light from a 0.3-lb projector mounted on the side of your helmet — the prototype is awkwardly unbalanced — to the display over your eye.

That makes it possible to superimpose data directly over your natural field of vision, without requiring you to look up at an eye-straining angle as with Google Glass or look down at a smartphone display as with the Army’s Nett Warrior system. Nor does the display block your field of vision like the ill-fated monocle display on the Army’s earlier Land Warrior.

Instead, you get an augmented reality effect where the data you desire — say, the direction to the nearest friendly unit or your objective — floats over the landscape....

[DetlefK]

1. Suppose, I were to hack into their data-channel...

What if I skew the coordinates by a few miles? Will they still be able to call in air-support at the right location?

What if I play around with the icons to pretend that units are at positions at which they are not?

What if I play around with the geographical info? Will I be able to lure a squad into an isolated ditch where they will have to climb their way out? Will I be able to pretend that a river is only hip-deep?



Smartphones and wearable technology have infiltrated our ways of life and will continue to do so over the next 10 years. In the near future, there will be a point, when you trust the augmented reality as much as what you see with your own eyes.

If your display says that the enemy is on the other side of the wall, will you lob a grenade across it?

[MADem]

2. Time will tell how secure that data is.

If it's not right, odds are you will only screw up once...

[westerebus]

3. Giving it the old jarhead test.

If we can't break this, nobody can.

Conversely, no cartoons and no boobs, freggin' thing is useless.

And then there's, Simon say put your hand on your head...