We wrote in the DANGER ROOM a few weeks ago about DARPA's plans to develop some fancy new binoculars that would tap the the brain's "neural signatures" to alert soldiers of danger. Today, I follow up with a longer story for Wired News about how these binoculars would work:
In a new effort dubbed "Luke's Binoculars" – after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon's R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different – Darpa says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers in three years.
The agency claims no scientific breakthrough is needed on the project – formally called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System. Instead, Darpa hopes to integrate technologies that have been simmering in laboratories for years, ranging from flat-field, wide-angle optics, to the use of advanced electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to rapidly recognize brainwave signatures.
Read the rest here....
