Saturday, November 10, 2007

How Long for the PS3 Version?

This is not a an image from a new video game, or the next sci-fi movie prop, this is the headgear being designed by the Royal Air Force to work with the new Joint Strike Fighter jet ...



from the "Switched" blog:

" New Pilot Helmet Allows Terminator Like X-Ray Vision

The British military is testing a new helmet that allows fighter pilots to see through their planes.

The system is actually very elegant in its simplicity. A series of camera are placed on the outside of the plane. The images from the cameras are fed back to the cockpit where they are projected inside the specially designed helmet, allowing the pilot to see 360 degrees around him/her. It will look to the pilot as if there is no plane at all... which, now that we think about it, sounds kinda creepy.

The cameras will even have infrared sensors, allowing pilots to look down, through the cockpit floor, in the dead of night, and identify targets."

Particularly interesting is that this visioning technology is being used on a jet with stealth technology to allow pilots to be able to see "as if the plane was not there". In other words, the plane is invisible to both the folks on the ground and the pilot!

One wonders at what point we'll even need to have pilots in the plane, and this really does become a video game.