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

http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/02/visions-of-the-future-dr0ne-a-webseries-about-autonomous-humanoid-soldiers/

by aespinoza • 14 years ago

20 7 14 years ago

PayUpPal2• 14 years ago

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.

batista• 14 years ago

>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.

It wouldn't have to even be a government (with the democratic sense) anymore. If those in power could establish a dictatorship and control the crowds with that way, I don't think anything would stopped them from doing it.

egypturnash3• 14 years ago

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

PayUpPal2• 14 years ago

A properly designed T2 obviously won't transfer information between different parts of it's system as text on top of video. This new DR0NE seems to be Robocop style, human inside machine, but even in this case I bet there are more efficient channels.

egypturnash3• 14 years ago

I read it as completely a made thing; I'm not sure there's really any evidence in the video for either reading. Just a few lines of text in the beginning talking about "autonomous drones".

As to whether or not the whole HUD is realistic for a software person, see my response to the previous reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468104

tkahn6• 14 years ago

I had the same reaction until I considered that the HUD is probably just a visual representation for the viewer's sake of all the decisions and data the drone is processing.

A drone wouldn't need a HUD at all.

egypturnash3• 14 years ago

I had a similar thought partway through writing my critique. I think that, given how close wearable computing seems to be getting, it's definitely worth pointing out things that don't work, even if they're a metaphor for other internal processes.

It would also depend on how the drone's AI is implemented. If it's based heavily on imitation of a human mind, overlaying data on the optics might well be the best way to get stuff like that in. Or if this "drone" is actually a Robocop-type brain in a box, as PayUpPal suggests.

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

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