New DARPA RFP Calls for All-In-One HUD that Sees Through Smoke, In The Dark and In Broad Daylight
DARPA wants a multi-band head-up display, which could be mounted to a helmet or a weapon scope, that combines several wavelengths of light into one image.
Sunny? No problem—the camera can see in visible light. Smoke bomb blocking your view? No sweat; the camera can see thermal infrared signatures. The system would also have near-infrared capability to help users see through darkness.
A new DARPA project called the Pixel Network for Dynamic Visualization (PIXNET) seeks proposals for new sensors that can do all of this in one package. A successful proposal would be small, lightweight, low-power and low-cost, said Nibir Dhar, DARPA program manager for PIXNET.
The system would communicate wirelessly with Android-based smart phones to fuse the images together, like you can see in the inset above. The warfighter would see a scene with visible imagery, thermal sensitivity and near-IR capability all in one.
Existing sensors are a good starting point, but they’re not advanced enough to combine multiple functions the way DARPA wants. Combining reflective and thermal bands will be a challenge, not to mention making it ultra-portable. “What we really need are breakthroughs in aperture design, focal plane arrays, electronics, packaging and materials science,” Dhar said.
(via DARPA Wants Cheap Head-Up Displays That Work In Any Kind Of Light | Popular Science)
(via joshbyard)
![Leathernext: Marines Want Better Networks, Sensors — And Terminator Vision | Danger Room | Wired.com
The Marines of the future are all about communication.
The Leathernecks want data networks that can keep them connected all the way from the decks of their ships to the beaches they storm. They want online search tools that rely on natural language instead of keywords (like the rest of us). And they want software that can sift through the oceans of data their wartime sensors and cameras collect — including tools that can scan through faces in a crowd, like the Terminator, and alert Marines to danger.
That’s according to the Corps’ blueprint for its science and technology needs over the next 20 years. Communications are a big, gaping hole for the Marines of the present, and the Marines want to hand their successors more seamless, networked ways of talking. That’s on top of other wish-list material, like advanced sensors that can sniff drugs and homemade bombs — oh, and laser-stopping goggles.
The blueprint (.pdf), first published by Inside Defense, doesn’t come out and criticize the Corps’ current suite of communications tools and sensors. But there’s a yawning technological chasm in-between the present-day Marines and where the Leathernecks want to be in 2025.
From “flagpole to fighting hole,” the blueprint writes, Marines need to be in constant communication: “The objective is to provide a holistic, end-to-end, turnkey [command-and-control] capability to execute commander’s intent, facilitate implicit communications, visualize battlespace reality, promote initiative, enable centralized command and decentralized control, and ultimately accomplish the mission.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3en8nUr0h1qzs4rbo1_1280.jpg)
