The army probably misunderstood what they meant by telemetry.
Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
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Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#22And here, ladies and gents, is why companies like Microsoft, will eternally resist getting aligned with internal employee groups Resisting selling to government entities, whether ICE or the Army. There is way too much money to be lost.
I mean, outspoken internal employee groups exist and higher ups acknowledge them. Satya drives home the empathy and feelings message more than any other CEO. And AFAIK, I don't recall an instance of Microsoft suppressing an employee's voice similar to what happens at Google frequently. They tried getting their employees to participate in their internal social networks but it never caught any attention. Microsoft just does a better job convincing their employees everything they do is for the greater good.
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#23Anyone work this technology and can talk about it (without breaking whatever NDA of course)? I'm a former infantryman and ... let's just say I'm _extremely_ skeptical of this kind of technology for all but the most niche use-cases (think, AR for the driver in the hole of the truck). Obviously for pilots stuff similar to this has been around for a while, but the article is not really clear about how exactly this would…
From what I've seen the two key use cases are 1) being able to see a "gun's eye" view, enabling you to poke your weapon out of cover and fire without exposing yourself 2) faster friend-foe identification through the AR overlay. Both of those seem like significant upgrades and arguably worth pursuing, but you can be sure a bunch of other nonsense will probably get tacked on that may make it worse than useless (like giving it excessive network connectivity: it wouldn't be fun to get a forced auto-update in combat).
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#24People on the ground never have use for such tech. These deals are all political and the actual equipment arrives by the truckloads and sits unboxed. When people rant about ridiculous military budgets and spending it isn't about cutting soldiers' salaries but shit like this.
> People on the ground never have use for such tech.
Strong disagree.
I would absolutely love to have access to field and barracks VR and AR tech. I think there are many immediate and practical and simple applications.
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#25People on the ground never have use for such tech. These deals are all political and the actual equipment arrives by the truckloads and sits unboxed. When people rant about ridiculous military budgets and spending it isn't about cutting soldiers' salaries but shit like this.
good for R&D I suppose
Private, patented R&D which benefits a single trillion-dollar corporation funded by public dollars. Too common in this country sadly.
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't work with the tech, but is there a use case for operating drones in the field? You want to peek around a corner or under a door, drop a tiny robot. Operate it with a handheld joystick and get a camera feed into your headset while still maintaining your regular field of vision. Final product won't necessarily take the form of the hololens. Might just be an attachment to whatever standard equipment they have, m…
Not really possible with HoloLens. This is AR not VR or a HUD.
I'm curious, what's the obstacle? Can't they take the display from the hololens, make it smaller and integrate it into one eye of an existing headset that the military uses?
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#27This makes me think of some of the battles that play out in Daemon and Freedom [1]. They're able to visualize all other parties in the area mapped by drones in real-time. They fight with massive AI swarms and are able to control the AI bots with hand gestures as they see them on the field, all while cruising around on modified motorcycles. We're in for a wild future.
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#28People on the ground never have use for such tech. These deals are all political and the actual equipment arrives by the truckloads and sits unboxed. When people rant about ridiculous military budgets and spending it isn't about cutting soldiers' salaries but shit like this.
Please point me to an example of this. Short of prepo supply, I never once saw an example of this.
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#29I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea of "make love, not war". I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the military. Trillions have been spent on wars or war preparation, and of course the net result is worsening for humanity. What if instead that money were spend on helping humanity? Do we really need a confl…
If it helps, I doubt the contract forbids MS from using any of its R&D on other projects, ie. Hololens 3/a consumer edition hololens.
Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
#30On the plus side, this means we are much more likely now to get actually awesome prosumer/consumer-grade AR systems with many of the current issues worked out in the next N years. It's starting to get to a point where, though it's still kind of lame, you can see how it would be awesome, but still needs $B of R&D so... I'll take it.
Sure, but the process of getting there will either directly physically harm some humans or just otherwise be highly financially inefficient (in the case of developing wartime technologies which have no wartime purpose).