Technologies of Deception Advancing

25 November Kent's Imperative blog - Technologies of Deception Advancing.

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Deception remains one of the enduring hard problems of the community, and its ever varying forms are testament to the creativity of the human mind, and the capacity of the human soul to lie.

This item at Defense Tech caught our eye. The concept of using holograms for tactical deception in the urban environment is an interesting one, and quite familiar to readers of science fiction (and their movie-going counterparts). The potential instantiation of such technology could be quite useful if executed properly. A more comfortable sniper hide, if nothing else, could make our lives much nicer...

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24 November Defense Tech - Fighting Shadows: Military Holograms by David Hambling.

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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, he’s got a hologram!”). In the movies, if they flicker a bit ("Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi..."), it’s just so the audience realises it’s a hologram and doesn’t 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.

This is a serious look at the technical possibilities for holograms. It’s 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.”...

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It’s one of those grandiose ideas that gets bandied about by Pentagon scientists and pops up in the press every few years. The “Face of Allah” weapon would beam a massive, lifelike hologram over a battlefield, projecting the image of some deity “to incite fear in soldiers on a battlefield,” according to one researcher.

We last checked in on holographic weapons research two years ago, when the University of New Hampshire was working on some Pentagon-funded projects. Since then, another university team has turned holograms into a reality — but not as tools of war. Not yet, at least.

Optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his teammates at the University of Arizona have demonstrated what The New York Times calls “actual moving holograms that are filmed in one spot and then projected and viewed in another spot.” The Times likens the holograms to the tiny image of Princess Leia that R2D2 showed Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars, only “a lot more haltingly, as the display changes only every two seconds.”

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...eld-holograms/