Visions Of The Future: DR0NE, A Webseries About Autonomous Humanoid Soldiers

This transition in modern armies from soldiers to different types of drones really scares me. Drones can easily be deployed on home soil against any kind of anti-government protests. The government would need just a few hundred of loyal operators to command a huge force.

Looking at history, the only times and societies where democracies and republics were established - e.g. Ancient Greece and Rome, France, US - were those were free citizens had access and could afford weapons similar to those used by the elite. With the transition to military drones in Western society I'm afraid the democracy will also transition to totalitarianism.

This poor drone! Its HUD is terrible.

- All information is displayed in white, over blown-out video. This means that in the combat flashbacks, the only reticules we see most of the time are over the friendlies; the ones over the enemy soldiers silhouetted against the bright sky are completely invisible.

- Said reticules are completely identical except for one thing: friendlies and noncombatants have text beneath them labeling them as such. Which often animates, drawing MORE attention to them than to the enemies.

I'll give it a pass on the terrible quality of the video beneath the HUD; we'll assume that it's because the drone is damaged. Although it's kinda mediocre even in the flashback.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot for the past year, as I've been working on a graphic novel that has a lot of HUD elements hovering in the scenes. I use an even more limited color palette than this short used for its drone's-eye view, but I make damn sure that every HUD element reads clearly against its background. I'll flag enemies with big triangles with exclamation points hovering over their heads. Important text gets color changes to emphasize it.

And I really now think that the most important challenge facing people designing augmented reality rigs for humans is to (a) guess what information is actually important, and make sure that's more visually interesting than stuff that's just in the "well that's nice to know" category (and provide quick and easy ways to manually toggle stuff, when that guess fails), and (b) make sure that it always shows up against the background...

(Compare and contrast to the HUD scenes in the Terminator movies[1], though - in some ways the Terminator's POV is even worse, what with the constant barrage of text on the periphery of the screen drawing the eye away from what's actually important.)

[1] here's a compilation of all of the POV scenes from T2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MeaaCwBW28