DARPA has finally demonstrated one of its most promising inventions: An augmented-reality HUD system that will give soldiers the same advantage of a jet fighter pilot. It displays battlefield data over the soldier’s environment, identifying friendly and enemy forces on land and air in real time. The system is nothing like Google Glass, which projects into the iris causing eye strain. Instead, the system overlays data over your natural field of vision using a new holographic display.
For the last two years, Darpa has been working to make waging cyberwar as easy as playing a video game. Now, like so many other games, it’s about to get a lot more in-your-face. At the Pentagon Wednesday, the armed forces’ far-out research branch known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency showed off its latest demos for Plan X, a long-gestating software platform designed to unify digital attack and defense tools into a single, easy-to-use interface for American military hackers. And for the last few months, that program has had a new toy: The agency is experimenting with using the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset to give cyberwarriors a new way to visualize three-dimensional network simulations–in some cases with the goal of better targeting them for attack.
