Lockheed Martin wins DARPA Augmented Reality Specs Contract

DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad-scientist division, has awarded Lockheed Martin $1m to develop “daylight-readable, see-through, low-profile, ergonomic” color video glasses.  That’s a tall order, and Lockheed Martin will be working with Microvision to build it.

The Lockheed-Microvision deal is part of a US military project named Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization (ULTRA-Vis). It’s intended to equip American combat troops not only with see-through video specs but also with a cunning “gesture recognition” interface allowing squad leaders to effectively scribble on the real world – for instance marking a door, and having the same mark show up in their teammates’ specs as well.

The US military has been investing in Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality for years, but hopefully whatever they come up with will eventually make it down to public consumer level.

via $1m for seethrough vidspecs in DARPA VR war-graffiti plan • The Register.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.