Google Glass-esque headgear could soon become the newest piece of standard-issue equipment for U.S. soldiers, and give them the ability to digitally track friendly and enemy locations, display 3D maps of battlefields, and watch live video from drones — all in real-time.
United Kingdom-based BAE systems built the Q-Warrior high-tech headset to live-stream more data to soldiers than ever before, and provides a tremendous battlefield advantage by showing soldiers multi-dimensional, full-color displays of battle zones outside their fields of vision.
“It’s not 10 years out from now, it’s been available for a while,” Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center project lead Donald Lee told Mashable. “It’s just how do you do it?”
Though the equipment itself is complete, the methods by which it will be deployed and secured are not. Developers still have a number of issues to consider and plan for, including figuring out how to transmit so much data to thousands of soldiers at once without interruption or too much distraction, and how to protect the devices from being hacked or interfered with.
According to project leaders, there are “plenty” of soldiers interested in getting the tech, and deployment could begin soon with initial test runs beginning on smaller, elite special forces teams. If the first use of the devices go well, we can expect a full rollout to the broader military quickly.
