Less ambitious than Microsoft’s combat goggle project, the PTG goggles being developed by DARPA have more modest but equally critical goals for soldiers. To know how to help them to treat, to maintain the material or to pilot. With a pilot project… learning to cook!
Why does the famous American military research agency wear augmented reality glasses to teach American soldiers how to cook? Probably not to compete with the chefs of the French Navy, the most renowned for its culinary talents. But to lay the technical foundations for a new generation of glasses for its soldiers around a concept: guiding tasks by perception.
No fighter helmet like the Microsoft version – which is starting to see lead in the fender, if not a lot of lead. But lightweight augmented reality glasses, whose mission is to support soldiers in non-combat tasks. The first three tasks identified by Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) are combat medicine (particularly for non-medics), equipment maintenance (vehicles, machines, etc.) and co-piloting for helicopters.
But before moving on to the battlefield, the Darpa trains for the time being with there… cooking. Because as project manager Bruce Drapper tells us (video above), the activity of cooking has all the right fundamentals. ” Cooking is an excellent example of a complex physical task that can be performed in many ways. There are lots of different objects: solids, liquids, etc. And state changes. It is therefore visually very complex. There is precise terminology, specialized tools. And many ways it can be done “.
Beyond the recipe to follow, AI and supporting sensors
While the glasses depicted in the video are often (but not exclusively) HoloLens, the fact is that for now, it’s less about hardware development and more about a software platform. Who aims to go beyond simply displaying things to do through the use of the microphone and the camera thanks to – you guessed it! –to the AI.
If the Darpa does not develop much more than that the “perception” part, it is easy to imagine that the objective is to have local programs (that is to say in the glasses) which can guide the soldiers what the sensor sees and what the microphones hear. Lower the heat if cooking… or add pressure to a tourniquet if medically assisting a wounded soldier, based on detection of a larger bloodstain on the fatigues. On the video clip, we see for the time being unpolished development interfaces, classic detection boxes for image analysis, real-time contextual displays, etc. And to make it all work, we have processors.
Qualcomm inside ?
Darpa project obliges, the public presentation of this project is logically fragmented (some programs are all or part secret defense) and exploratory. But one thing is certain: heavy helmet or light glasses, whatever the final form of the project, it will need some form of computing power. And in this game, a semiconductor player stands out, namely Qualcomm.
A Qualcomm which is already at the heart of almost all current VR headset designs with its Snapdragon XR1 (2018) and Snapdragon XR2 (2020), but which has also just launched a new generation of chip for augmented reality glasses, the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 (“the” because it is a trio of three separate chips!) With now three generations of chips in this field, Qualcomm is by far the player most likely to find itself to pilot the future Darpa glasses… when they see the light of day. Because the question is no longer the “if” but the “when”: as new technologies infuse the battlefield and as the professions of the army become more and more technical (piloting reconnaissance drones, etc. .), the arrival of operational support glasses no longer seems to be a simple hypothesis. But a proven future that is being written now.
Darpa, via Engadget
