Think Avatar for military spies. Pentagon far-out research arm Darpa wants to turn surveillance into a 3-D experience for troops. It has launched the Fine Detail Optical Surveillance (FDOS) Program, and are requesting proposals for prototypes of optical imaging systems that would use “advanced high-resolution 3-D imaging technology.” Darpa wants two kinds of surveillance systems: portable units for active battle and drone-ready systems for unmanned planes.
The agency wants proposals that start from scratch, using a fundamentally new model for obtaining video footage. The 3-D surveillance should be able to monitor moving targets with high resolution, from different ranges, and without the need for users to do much legwork, like scanning or refocusing on a target. Darpa anticipates that 3-D surveillance would boost field of vision and depth of vision “by over 100X” compared to existing systems.
That’s a big step up from the best drone surveillance in use right now. According to Darpa, current spy-cam systems with 3-D capabilities are big and unwieldy, and can only handle a small surveillance zone without user input. The new 3-D models, by comparison, should rapidly identify targets that are as tough to spot as ”a needle moving along the surface of a haystack.” Plus, they’d solve one of the biggest complaints about Predator video feeds: Depth perception is often lost in grainy footage, and the view is so narrow that it’s been likened to “looking through a soda straw.” This new project holds the possibility of changing that. Next step is doing something about the motion sickness that goes along with swooping in the air.
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