The military are usually leaders in applying advanced technology from the jet engine to the internet right through to the modern day and 3D printers. Killing people is now a fine art from thanks to the electronic age but its also helped reduce civilian casualties through smart munitions. It was the Heads Up Display (HUD) pioneered in military aircraft in the mid-20th century that was a very early practical implementation of AR.
Augmented reality is a technology that comes at a time when technology is empowering the world superpowers' ability to wage wars. Information is the new gunpowder. Radar provides early warning but stealth technologies make the weapons of war invisible. Precision weapons allow targeting of important installations with a handful of munitions instead of a sending hundreds of bombers as in WWII and assists the media war with images of bombs destroying military targets without harming civilians. Remote controlled reconnasiance drones provide real-time video and complement high resolution satellite imagery that can see through cloud. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is the latest toy and could mean the end of the human bomber pilot.
The possibility for Soldier 2.0 upgraded with overlay of information upon their senses is a clear opportunity for the application of AR and AN technology. The other arms of the military will benefit from improved targeting and navigation but its the army that will benefit the most. War is ultimately about conquest of land and this means troops on the ground. No technological solution in our lifetimes is going to change that paradigm as its changing on the sea, in the air and in space to teleoperated robots that developed from Intercontinental Ballistic
Missile research.
The foot soldier has always faced the harshest conditions with the greatest risk to life. UN peacekeepers have it worse because they are often under orders not to return fire unless absolutely necessary. The potential for information generated by micro-reconnassance drones is
already being explored. Robocop-esque visual interfaces and headmounted devices are offer potential for the ordinary troops and specialists to be safer with lookahead-type vision, automated threat recognition and display, intuitive GPS interface, knowledge of friend or foe idenitfication, visualisation of machinegun fire spread, troop orders visually displayed, comrade camera view and a multitude of other lifeprotecting advantages.
The advantage of informatiuon is too much for the human brain much like the data from the senses is too much for the conscious mind. The brain has an important part where sense information is preprocessed and vast amounts removed to allow the realtime processing of the real world and application of conscious decisions to respond to stimuli. The preprocessing function reduces sensory saturation and overload and is a vital part of any augmentation of human sensory systems with digital information. Presenting the right information in the right way at the right time will be the advances in military technology that provide the
true leap for military and civilian applications.
The huge military funding budgets and the resulting research that permeates into the commerical world will inject leaps of technology and reductions in price that would otherwise be decades away as has happened with so much of the technological revolution seen in the 20th century as much as centuries before. It is perhaps better this way rather than as in Alfred Nobel's case where research aimed at bettering mining science ended up with making the bomb better and wracked by the guilt of the misuse of TNT he started the Nobel Prize. The advantage of AR and AN has undoubtably already benefited from the military and it a technology that
has clear benefits for their purposes so it is an inevitability, though not one I can say I'm happy with.
