How many targets are we talking about locating at a time? You would think with all the protests (Egypt, Libya, Occupy) they would need to have a MASSIVE amount of capacity. What would happen if a usmc soldier viewed state street and the system just locked up? DARPA would be in deep shiat!

This would be cool for spotting women that might be staking me out in my treehouse...

cool of scary?

"here, plug this into your brain stem, it will tell you who to kill. .. "

BarkingUnicorn: IOW, human improved machine's accuracy, not vice versa.

This sort of thing has been a theme in sci-fi for a while now.

// basically, machines aren't good at making judgment calls, so it takes human intervention. EX, In Andromeda, it takes a human to navigate slipstream properly.

"It was thought that, computers -- even ones with artificial intelligence -- were incapable of this reality-altering guesswork. Even the most sophisticated starship in the Systems Commonwealth has an organic sentient to pilot through the starlanes -- a prospect some sentients regard as deeply disturbing but others find comforting.

However, machines with organic neural components (ie- cyborgs, in this case) have the intuition required to do so. VX, for example of the Consensus of Parts was able to navigate the slipstream because he had these components and thus the intuition required. Thus, an organic brain is required, though the organism itself need not be wholly organic.

However, it appears even a full AI is capable of navigating the slipstream to some extent, albeit in a very haphazard and dangerous way. When the entire original organic crew of the Andromeda Ascendant was killed by the Magog from the Magog Worldship, the Andromeda's AI made the journey from the galaxy M82 to Triangulum by wandering the slipstream pilotless for 13 months.

I had a buddy who helped do the finance proposal for these a few years ago and told me about them. Pretty nifty.

Luke Skywalker Binoculars? Isn't that where you dip your wang in blue paint, and then teabag someone so your balls rest in their eyes, leaving a blue streak across their forehead, with their nose up your butt and them complaining about how they thought you smelled bad on the outside?

If not, it should be.

BarkingUnicorn: From this Yahoo article: "What's more, the agency reports that the system cut false alarms - identification of activity as threats that really weren't - from 810 per hour to five."

From this Wired article: ""In testing of the full CT2WS kit, absent radar, the sensor and cognitive algorithms returned 810 false alarms per hour. When a human wearing the EEG cap was introduced, the number of false alarms dropped to only five per hour...."

IOW, human improved machine's accuracy, not vice versa.

It's really both. This device allowed a soldier to spot twice as many threats and regular binoculars, but this device requires a soldier to be used effectively.

The machine improved the human's reliability, and the human improved the machine's accuracy.

Dear DARPA,

I want my giant robot army already.
I know you've built it and you're just waiting for the next world war (or whatever) to unveil the damn things.
The problem is I'm getting old and I'd like to drive one before my arthritis kicks in.
Stop screwing around with this other stuff until you deliver the mechs.

I seem to remember there was a similar system a few years ago where they showed photos taken by drones to people for just a fraction of a second and picked up a similar unconcious signal to highlight the ones to check more thoroughly.

way south: Dear DARPA,

I want my giant robot army already.
I know you've built it and you're just waiting for the next world war (or whatever) to unveil the damn things.
The problem is I'm getting old and I'd like to drive one before my arthritis kicks in.
Stop screwing around with this other stuff until you deliver the mechs.

But this can only help. It's hard to strike fear into the hearts of you enemies when you can't find them. This will allow you to accurately target the crushing blows of your roboarmy.

So the gadget picks up on what's basically 'whispers' from the back of your mind and then tells you what you're missing? God, I'd like to hook something like that up to my nieces. They insist that there's boogeymen in the closet and under their beds.

Human brains are miracles of image processing and pattern recognition.

Not so good at higher math, or range perception, or lots of other things that computers excel at. But let our million-years-of-evolution meatheads get a brief glimpse at a grassy field and HELLO *there a person* and *there a person* and *over there a person hiding in the tall grass with a pointed stick ready to kill me and my family*

StopLurkListen: Human brains are miracles of image processing and pattern recognition.

Not so good at higher math, or range perception, or lots of other things that computers excel at. But let our million-years-of-evolution meatheads get a brief glimpse at a grassy field and HELLO *there a person* and *there a person* and *over there a person hiding in the tall grass with a pointed stick ready to kill me and my family*

Actually, they're amazing at higher math, just not at expressing it on to paper. Catching a baseball is an amazing feat of math:


I can't read that for shiat anymore, but I sure can successfully catch a baseball moving in an arc at a very high rate of speed toward my person.

Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

DarnoKonrad: cool of scary?

"here, plug this into your brain stem, it will tell you who to kill. .. "

I would've went with the Scary tag. People's brains shouldn't be so readily trifled with. Especially considering how little we actually know about the brain, and how every brain is wired differently. The area we have the most common with is the area where language is stored, and that's only in 73% of people.

But honey, it's subconscious I swear!!!

DARPA, I salute you for bringing us one step closer to actualizing the multi-target Itano Circus.

Wouldn't Luke just use the force?

OriginalGamer:



DANGER! DANgerrr...



...false alert.

MrEricSir: Wouldn't Luke just use the force?

There are any number of sci-fi movies and TV shows that depicted something more closely resembling this technology but probably more people have seen a picture of the deleted scenes of Luke using his macrobinoculars than those.

I always assumed that when a threat realized you were there a giant ! would appear above the head. Have I been lied to this entire time?

Fun until somebody hacks it to display flying dicks all over the place.

StopLurkListen: Human brains are miracles of image processing and pattern recognition.

Not so good at higher math, or range perception, or lots of other things that computers excel at. But let our million-years-of-evolution meatheads get a brief glimpse at a grassy field and HELLO *there a person* and *there a person* and *over there a person hiding in the tall grass with a pointed stick ready to kill me and my family*

Coelacanth: So the gadget picks up on what's basically 'whispers' from the back of your mind and then tells you what you're missing? God, I'd like to hook something like that up to my nieces. They insist that there's boogeymen in the closet and under their beds.

Just a whisper. I hear it in my ghost.

hmm...I wonder if this the same thing as that feeling of being watched? Your brain recognizing a threat that you didn't even notice.

Maybe I'm not a paranoid as they think.

Puts on tinfoil hat and hides in corner away from the refridgerator.

What happens when your lost-in-the-sauce Lieutenant walks up and orders you to do something dangerously stupid, or stupidly dangerous? Will the system tag the retarded butterbar as a threat and nuke him from orbit?

Cuz I'm okay with that.

I just had an horrible scary awesome terrifying idea.

What if that gizmo picked up on the "Whore of War"?

conventional binoculars that only allowed soldiers to spot 47% of threats in the tests

Those threats didn't pay any income tax, so they don't count.