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Home » Bizarro » Fighting Shadows: Military Holograms

Fighting Shadows: Military Holograms

In sci­ence fic­tion, holo­grams are real­is­tic, mov­ing three-​​dimensional images. (Remember Arnie being spooked by his mir­ror self in Total Recall, and the price­less line Watch out, hes got a holo­gram!). In the movies, if they flicker a bit (“Help me, Obi-​​Wan Kenobi…”), its just so the audi­ence realises its a holo­gram and doesnt get con­fused. Real life holo­grams are a lot more lim­ited, so I was inter­ested to see this study car­ried by Dr David Watt on Holograms As Nonlethal Weapons for NTIC, the Nonlethal Technology Innovations Center in New Hampshire.
hologram.jpg
This is a seri­ous look at the tech­ni­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties for holo­grams. Its a far cry from blue sky fan­tasies like the Air Force 2025 Airborne Holographic Projector which dis­plays a three-​​dimensional visual image in a desired loca­tion, removed from the dis­play gen­er­a­tor or the even more wildly opti­mistic Hologram, Death: Hologram used to scare a tar­get indi­vid­ual to death.
Real holo­grams will not fool peo­ple at short range and they do not move, nor can they be pro­jected into a remote loca­tion. But they might still have their uses.
One of Watt’s sug­gested appli­ca­tions is ‘decep­tion in an urban envi­ron­ment’. Take a shop win­dow and replace it with a holo­gram of a win­dow dis­play, and you have an appar­ently innocu­ous space where troops can be sta­tioned with­out any hint of their pres­ence. A vehi­cle (a car or bus) could use sim­i­lar trompe loeil effect.
There is the pos­si­bil­ity of using holo­grams to cre­ate vir­tual forces or vir­tual obsta­cles, but the prob­lems are all too appar­ent. The sit­u­a­tion is much bet­ter indoors where the opti­cal envi­ron­ment can be con­trolled. Dr Watt sug­gests instal­la­tions could have vir­tual doors, walls and win­dows as ways of con­fus­ing or mis­lead­ing intrud­ers.
A more unusual approach is using a speckle holo­gram as vir­tual smoke. This type of holo­gram pro­duces an image that appears to be in front of its real sur­face, and this could project a con­fus­ing image of three-​​dimensional spots before their eyes, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for view­ers to judge what is in front of them and how far away it is.
The human eye is dif­fi­cult to fool, notes Dr Watt, but infra-​​red sen­sors are much less sophis­ti­cated there is no need for the same level of colour fidelity. An infra-​​red holo­gram of a vehi­cle could make a very con­vinc­ing decoy. Automated sys­tems (such as mis­sile guid­ance) with no humans to spot the flaws should be par­tic­u­larly easy to fool. However, as Watt points out the tech­nol­ogy does not yet exist to cre­ate infra-​​red holo­grams.
It is the third dimen­sion that makes holo­grams uniquely dif­fer­ent to other means of cam­ou­flage and poten­tially valu­able. During WWII, cir­cles of black cloth were used to give the impres­sion of bomb craters on run­ways after air raids, but these would not stand up to close inspec­tion. Holograms would allow you to put realistic-​​looking holes or craters on any sur­face and con­fuse any pos­si­ble dam­age assess­ment.
Watts con­clu­sion is Fascinating, but — there are just too many lim­i­ta­tions at present. Size lim­its and mate­r­ial restric­tions are a real prob­lem, and

Most NLT [non lethal tech­nol­ogy] appli­ca­tions rely on psy­cho­log­i­cal pre­dis­po­si­tion of belligerents. 

In other words it will take a cer­tain amount show­man­ship to set the illu­sion up in the first place; this may be fea­si­ble in Las Vegas, but not on the bat­tle­field.
But per­haps the biggest stum­bling block at present is the cost of holo­grams large enough for prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions. Watt quotes $10,000 for a one metre by two holo­gram, or a hefty $200k for one metre by six metres, which is a lot of money espe­cially if the bad guys decide to test whether one is real by putting a bul­let through it.
– David Hambling

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November 24th, 2006 | Bizarro | 228636 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/11/24/fighting-shadows-military-holograms/Fighting+Shadows%3A+Military+Holograms2006-11-24+15%3A26%3A04jimmy_wu You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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  1. Dr.Soehring says:
    November 25, 2006 at 1:01 pm

    I can imag­ine, that hographic tech­nol­ogy will be use­ful as guide­line to con­stru­tion of buil­dongs :
    Project a holo­graphic pic­ture ofe the desired build­ing as a “SIM-Building”-outline with all sup­pli­ances e.g. cables, water-​​tubes etc. and bulid in on the spot.
    That way, You won’t need plans writ­ten on paper and even an archi­tect won’t be nec­es­sary any more.
    Another gear ma become the “Holographic TV-​​Room”, were You may decide, if you want to sit right in the mid­dle of the action or han­dle a “Act-with”-facility :
    What can a man or woman like more than shot­ting down the evel in favorite films with a “SIM-​​Gun” or take the risk of film-​​ending by get­tin vir­tual shooted him/​herself ?
    Even the adven­ture of bee­ing kissed by “JamesBond” with “Feelie”-Films man­aged through “Brainstorming” could become a real thrill.

    Reply
  2. David Hambling says:
    November 27, 2006 at 3:42 pm

    As the piece men­tions, it is not cur­rently pos­si­ble to project a holo­gram ‘onto’ any­thing yet, so the appli­ca­tion are more limited.

    Reply
  3. Dave Bell says:
    December 10, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    Stop-​​frame ani­ma­tion.
    You don’t need to be able to record images at 25 fps, or what­ever is good enough for a mov­ing pic­ture. You just need to be able to play them back. There have been all sorts of moving-​​picture machines that could be used to pro­duce holo­grams.
    The mil­i­tary uses for a holo­gram What-​​The-​​Butler-​​Saw machine are left as an exer­cise for the reader, but I think it will be a while before we see skele­tal war­riors spring­ing out of the ground in the style of Ray Harryhausen.

    Reply
  4. jonathan says:
    December 1, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    Flight 77 from 9/​11? Considering the lack of any sig­nif­i­cant wreck­age, and the tiny hole in the wall of the Pentagon (how does a 757 fit through that?), and the fact eye­wit­ness Keith Wheelhouse claims he saw a 2nd plane “shad­ow­ing” the AA jet and veer­ing away right before impact as well.. but so many peo­ple SAW the 757 fly into the pen­ta­gon! Where did it go? How did those steel and tita­nium engines just evap­o­rate? Why didn’t the engines leave ANY trace of impact­ing the pen­ta­gon wall? LOL!

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  5. coragan says:
    March 17, 2008 at 8:59 pm

    there is a thing i call mat­ter con­trol it deals with com­put­ers being able to spot rec­og­nize and con­tol atoms in the air with it the posi­b­li­ties are end­less and using it to take and add or remove elec­trons form a molicule such as hydro­gen
    you could change its form to another ele­ment but more if you took this power and had the com­puter
    take the attoms of dust par­ti­cles and build an image with it and add light or lasers to ilu­mi­nate and or color it a real fan­tasy world holo­gram is posi­ble but the trick is fig­ur­ing out how to mag­ne­tize an attom via elec­tro static

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