We have seen the iPad being used in many different situations before. Hollywood loves it, bloggers are slowly finding their way out to work from the tablet, doctors are slowly switching from paper-based filing system to more appealing touch-based digital ones.
The US Army is now looking forward to implementing the iPad in their daily operations as well. Thanks to a software developed by Textron System, soldiers will soon be able to fire up (no pun intended) an application on their iPad to get a bird-eye view of a map containing detailed info about the locations of allies and enemies.
The system relies on a backend called SoldierEyes (“a secure cloud that runs lots of little applets for intelligence, command-and-control and battlefield awareness”) and represent friendly forces as little blue dots on a map that updates in real-time. Of course GPS technology is deeply involved in the deployment of this application.
But there’s an Android app as well:
Load Augmented Reality, another SoldierEyes sub-app, ditches the map. Instead, it uses your handheld’s camera to give you a picture of what’s in front of you — but with the colored boxes of friendlies and enemies in position on the screen. The idea is make sure that soldiers getting out of their vehicles don’t lose a sense of their surroundings once the Humvee doors swing open and they aren’t behind a computer screen anymore.
With a front-facing camera likely coming in the next generation iPad, I wouldn’t be surprised to see face-recognition technologies implemented in this kind of apps.
