Invisible Warriors: The Future of Camo
New Camo
IMAGE BY Courtesy Special Operations Apps
Camouflage works by confusing the brain. Disruptive patterns obscure a form's outline, making objects less likely to stand out. But camo has a weakness: No pattern works for every environment. Special Operations Apps, a software design firm in Wilmington, North Carolina, has developed a process to make site-specific camouflage.
The software combines photographs of a given location, taken by satellites, drones or reconnaissance teams, into customised, terrain-specific patterns that can be printed directly on a garment. Because the pattern is made from images taken at various focal lengths, it also inhibits depth perception, making it more difficult for the brain to process camouflaged surfaces into a single object. For now, use of site-specific camouflage will be limited to Special Operations units. And it could be short-lived.
Special Operations Apps recently filed a patent on an "adaptive" material that consists of a vinyl substrate, a flexible image display that could adjust to a given environment, and thermoelectric panels that could modify a soldier's heat signature.
Read more about the invisible warriors of the future: The engineering breakthroughs that will make everything from planes to subs to soldiers...disappear.