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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Imagine being given a mission and being able to recreate the target area in VR and walk around while you conduct your estimate, orders, and rehearsals.

Or imagine being able to look over a piece of ground and see the location of your people annotated through AR. Or driving a route and seeing your planned route annotated.

Yes please absolutely get this into my hands.

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Ok, now imagine you have to hump an extra 10lbs of crap in 120 degree heat for weeks on end while the glasses are fogged up and you got a sunscreen smudge on the lens. And your field of view is now greatly complicated with extraneous information you don't need to know like ammo capacity of your current magazine. And you need to low crawl through a drainage/sewer ditch and through a hole in a fence to get to another position with all that crap on your head/body without getting tangled up.

And now your patrol got delayed for some reason so now none of that crap is charged or working anyway. And your glasses or the controller got dislodged during a sprint to cover. Or you need to find the reset button for some reason.

You can have my set. It might be a valuable training tool though.

> You can have my set.

Thanks, I'll take it!

You can say the same as you have about any technology. Why lug around a big heavy rifle when you could carry sharpened sticks? I guarantee you people said exactly the same about the first radios, for example. Now you wouldn't even consider leaving the wire without a radio under any circumstances whatsoever.

>You can say the same as you did about any technology. Why lug around a big heavy rifle when you could carry sharpened sticks?

Because the enemy doesn't use sticks, first of all.

>I guarantee you people said exactly the same about the first radios, for example.

They did not, because it represented a fundamental change in how ground warfare could be conducted and not everyone carried them (not everyone carries them today either, which is telling). Namely, coordinating accurate indirect fire.

>Now you wouldn't even consider leaving the wire without a radio under any circumstances whatsoever.

Because I want to be able to call in air-support and indirect. The difference with all these examples is that the technologies you are mentioning represented a game-changing way in how to enable infantry-support operations. It's not immediately clear to me that the same is true for a AR/VR helmet system used by infantry. It's possible that other branches could find uses for it in the same vein. Like the FSO using it to "see" the FLT and better coordinate indirect fire.

> I guarantee you people said exactly the same about the first radios, for example

This doesn't prove anything and is 300% survivorship bias. There are thousands of tech innovations that were utter shit and we never hear about them. AR on the battlefield as describe above is a COD player wet dream and has no basis in reality.

> King estimates that the average soldier goes into action with a hefty 20 lbs of batteries.

> AR on the battlefield as describe above is a COD player wet dream and has no basis in reality.

I can only offer that I want to try it.

The map is not the terrain. A VR walk through isn't as valuable if the layout of the target area changes. Same with troop locations and routes. Any training or planning use will still come down to quality of intelligence.

In general, it seems very unlikely that all of this will work coordinated in battlefield conditions. It would be like pulling off an AR MMORPG, except everyone is carrying their Xbox on their back and running around randomly

> The map is not the terrain.

Where did I say it was?

Let the recce give me a 3d sketch map of the target area as they understand it and let me walk around in it. Better than them trying to describe it and me imagining it!

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