Saturday, December 25, 2010

With the benefit of hindsight?

I used to joke about having the benefit of hindsight means literally, having eyes on our bottoms. Well, with today's technology, this seems possible, according to this report forwarded to me by a friend:

DARPA aims to make soldier of tomorrow impervious to sneak attacks with 360 degree vision
By Michael Gorman posted Dec 23rd 2010 8:43AM


DARPA is currently soliciting proposals for the development of Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras, also known as SCENICC for those who prefer brevity. This latest project is a visual enhancement system that seeks to meet all of our armed forces terrorist-hunting and war-waging visual needs. The system, which is purely theoretical at this point, will provide a 360 degree, three-dimensional field of view for soldiers in the field. This optical omniscience is obtained through the use multiple cameras, including images from airborne drones. Soldiers will have real time 10x zoom capabilities and can operate everything via voice commands. As if that weren't enough, SCENICC employs augmented reality to identify and track targets in a way (we presume) not unlike your garden variety T-800. As this bit of kit is years from production, our commandos will have to make do for now with smartphones and wrist displays to keep an eye on enemies of the state.

(It took only 172 years since the first ever photograph of a man in 1838, to make this possible.)
Link

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