MILITARY DESIGN
The US Marines, looking to update their field strategy, will make like videogame commandos later this year when they suit up in digital camouflage.
"If you were downloading a picture and the computer froze at 85 percent, it'd have that pixel effect - that's what the uniform looks like," says Major Gabriel Patricio, project officer with Marine Corps Systems Command, about the fabric's appearance close up. From a distance of 200 to 500 feet, the bitmapped design - called Marine Pattern, or MarPat for short - melts into its environment, capturing and reflecting light and color from nearby objects despite having no solid shapes or color.
The new "cammies" motif, part of an overhaul of the Marines' 20-year-old standard issue, was selected from 100 designs submitted by military developers and hunting-product manufacturers. Researchers at the US Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command facility whittled the entries down to eight, whose shapes, sizes, and colors were then tweaked on computers and printed both on paper and on a nylon-cotton blend. From there, the options were scrutinized by Marine snipers for visual deceptiveness in daylight and darkness (using night-vision goggles) before being electronically altered again. Marines weighed in via focus groups and Internet surveys, preferring the familiar cat stripes to the digital pixels. Turns out, though, they'll be getting MarPat, the more deceptive, albeit less attractive, of the two. The pixelated pattern will come in three color schemes - urban, woodland, and desert - and will appear on thousands of newly redesigned Marine combat utility uniforms this year.
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