Army Goggles Will Feature Facial Recognition Tech ‘Very Soon’
Army Goggles Will Feature Facial Recognition Tech ‘Very
Soon’
A modified gamer
headset will allow soldiers to see through a drone’s eyes, aim around corners,
and identify the faces of enemies in their sights.
“Very soon” U.S. soldiers could be able to identify enemies,
suspects, or any persons of interest they’re seeking just by looking through
the goggles on their head.
U.S. Army officials are testing a new
headset that will—potentially—allow soldiers looking through them to recognize
the faces of individuals in a crowd, and much more, including translate
foreign language street signs into English, see through the eyes of nearby
flying bug drones, and train anywhere in a semi-virtual environment, all
through the same lens.
Army
officials on Tuesday showed off the latest version of their Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, a lightweight set of goggles for soldiers
allowing them to blend digital elements into a soldier’s field
of view.
“We’re
going to demonstrate very, very soon, the ability, on body — if there are
persons of interest that you want to look for and you’re walking around, it
will identify those very quickly,” said Col. Chris Schneider, project manager
for IVAS, at a U.S. Army
Futures Command demonstration in Virginia..
To
help, the Army wants the eye-goggles also to display the digital view from
small bug drones, such as the Black Hornet. The Army is distributing
those “personal reconnaissance drones” to help soldiers conduct intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance. Elite Special Forces units began to experiment
with the drones in 2015.
“We’re
tracking very well to integrate all sensor data onto to IVASthat
we can move across a network, Schneider said, “…whether it be a UAV or a ground sensor, any visual data that we can
process, we can get to the soldier. That’s what we’re working on.” Army
officials expect to demonstrate the drone view capability in October at Fort
Pickett, in Virginia.
Those
capabilities are on top of a variety of virtual training applications that
would also be available on the headset, which is a modified version of the
Microsoft HoloLens gaming device. “We’ve got 3000 hours of feedback already.
That’s very rare that occurs,” Schneider said.
Before
soldiers get the new IVAS, (wide deployment is not
expected until the mid 2020s) many will receive new Enhanced Night Vision
Goggle-Binoculars, or ENV-Gs, as soon as the fall.
The new night vision goggles will feature an on-rifle sight that can provide a
visual feed to the lenses. It will allow the soldier to essentially shoot around corners or even
behind them.
“Everything
that his weapon is seeing, he’ll see it. We actually bring people down to our
range, have them look this way, engage this way,” said Brig. Gen. David Hodne,
Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team director.
“That
rapid target acquisition would actually allow him, if he chose, to stand behind
the building to actually stick his weapon out, not expose his body, and he
would still be able to engage targets, accurately, without exposing himself,”
said Hodne.
“These
will go to some of our top tier units now. Then, when IVAScomes
out, it will go to some of those top tier units. Then we will cascade this
capability until the point where some of our much, much older goggles, we just
cascade them out. So the entire force becomes much effective.”
One
sergeant first-class at the demonstration who declined to be identified for
this story claimed that he witnessed a soldier successfully hit a target from
300 meters using the device while laying on his back with his rifle pointing
over his shoulder downrange.
Army
Futures Command was created in October 2017 and will reach full operational
capability at the end of this month. Tuesday’s demonstration and a
subsequent one on Wednesday evening on Capitol Hill are an effort to showcase
progress on the Army’s modernization priorities to lawmakers.
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