Retinal scanners have tended to be rather clumsy devices, conditions need to be ideal to get a good read. The person being scanned needs to stand still in front of the scanner – then hopefully an eyelash doesn’t get in the way. It is for this reason that the latest retinal scanning developments from DARPA and Southern Methodist University are big news – if their claims are to be believed, not only do subjects not have to be standing in front of the camera, they don’t even need to be standing still.
Theoretically, the new scanner would be able to scan multiple subjects from a crowd, and because the scanner does not have to capture the whole eye to get a reading – a partial scan is all that is needed.
Something to think about the next time you go to a demonstration.
If they succeed, DARPA will be able to follow your car everywhere you go—even if you get into downtown Manhattan's traffic—making movies with car chases absolutely pointless. If Steve McQueen were alive, he would be very sad today.
The new radar is called Multipath Exploitation Radar, and combines three-dimensional urban maps with a Ku-band radar running at frequencies high enough to resolve vehicle details. This makes the MER capable of fixing a target on anything that moves on the ground. The system will depend on unmanned air vehicles, bouncing their radars on ground and buildings and comparing the patterns with 3D maps. The result would be a complete picture of the movement in a city. Once they nail the chasing of one vehicle, DARPA wants to enable multiple target tracking.
This rather unconvincing video shows a current project of DARPA’s, in which a jet is accelerated first by regular propulsion, then ramjets, then scramjets — eventually pushing the vehicle to a ridiculous mach 6. That’s somewhere around 1700-2000 meters per second, or ~4000MPH. That’s if they can keep the thing from breaking apart. Wikipedia tells us that “while very short suborbital scramjet test flights have been performed, no flown scramjet has ever been designed to survive a flight test.” That’s not very promising.
I say unconvincing because first of all, they don’t make mach 6 look very exciting. Also, the people watching look bored. And the patriotic music pretty much overwhelms the narration. If this is the same amount of care they’re planning on putting into this hypersonic craft, that thing is going to break up before they get it on the runway.
The idea is that these things could carry 12000 pounds of payload over huge distances extremely quickly. Like across the Pacific in two hours. I mean, that’s obviously the application of a fast airplane. But I wonder if they’ve considered that if they just load this sucker up with ball bearings or something and drop them out, they’ve essentially created a flying railgun. Scrap metal hitting a target at 4000MPH? Yeah, possibly destructive.
Anyway, the video is years old but it’s news because they’re planning a test flight for April. The landing site is actually just a place in the ocean they’re going to let it crash, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing these things overhead any time soon. But it’s good to keep abreast of developments like this in case you see one; otherwise you might think it’s a UFO.
[CrunchGear]
