DARPA Looks To Put Eyes In Backs of Soldiers' Heads With SCENICC System

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DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency, has given us a lot of strange gadgets over the years, and they’ll carry the streak right on with their SCENICC system, which is currently up for bid to create.

It’s been a while since we heard from the folks out at DARPA, so it’s good to hear that they haven’t accidentally torn open a hole in the space-time continuum that caused them to fall backward into time and emerge on the other side in a parallel universe where velociraptors evolved from men or something. This time, we’re getting a look at the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras, which is where the mouthful of acronym SCENICC comes from. SCENICC basically connects some helmet eyepieces to a whole series of cameras, including some support from aerial drones as well, that lets soldiers see all over the battlefield.

What’s more is the effect being called “Terminator-vision”, which sounds like a kind of augmented reality in which a soldier can look at something and have information about the something in question sent back to his eyepieces.

You’d also get 10x zoom for both eyes, and a sphere of vision ranging about a kilometer (roughly half a mile for the US crowd), projectile tracking (so you know where the bullets are going and coming from), as well as some weapons lock-on features so you can compensate for wind and the like on the fly.

It’s an amazing system, no doubt, but it’s still under development so when it comes out is anyone’s guess. Still, when it does, I want one–imagine how easy it’d make driving to no longer have a blind spot anywhere at all. But considering what it would no doubt cost, I’ll probably have to wait to get a first-generation model surplus or something.