The future soldier

We have now looked at how Augmented Reality will evolve and impact several different parts of society. But as of now, we have not really touch on the one of the main drivers of AR in society, the military. As a reader of this blog, you might be aware of that fighter jet pilots have already used AR functionality for a while already in their helmets.

 

The militaries around the world are now spending considerable amounts of money in developing a mix of new AR and Virtual Reality technology, as they see this as key ingredients in their future combat operations. With the AR glasses coming to the market, it will be of an obvious benefit for the normal soldier, as it can serve both as a communication device and for informational purposes. In the upcoming Q-Warrior, the soldier will have both access to map data, enemy locations, live stream from drones, night vision and general information from the command central. .

With the introduction of the Oculus Rift, and their backing by Facebook, you can probably imagine the soldier conducting training operations in a virtual world, with these glasses on. As an example, the Norwegian Army has started to incorporate these into the real world as well. With the Oculus Rift you can also display real world images with a digital overlay, just by having some cameras giving you the necessary information. Imagine the driver, the commander or the operator of a tank. Inside a tank you have limited eyesight, which also limits your handling abilities in war situations. So what they started to experiment with is to place multiple cameras on the outside of the tank, which are then displayed through the Oculus Rift display. So as the operator move his head around, he will get displayed the outside view according to the direction of your head. Teknisk Ukeblad (In Norwegian), also have a video displaying this in practice.

We see this just as the first step of usage of the likes of Oculus Rift in this context, later we believe you could easily add digital overlays to these images. So the driver would be able to see information about the vehicle, maps, the enemy etc. While the canon man, in addition be will able to see his enemy and aim and control his canon through the glasses, even through night vision. The possibilities are limitless, and we believe this is just one example on how AR will revolutionize the army. It could very well be a first step towards developing a real life Iron Man.

Photo: Eirik Helland Urke - www.tu.no