
Visions Of The Future: DR0NE, A Webseries About Autonomous Humanoid Soldiers - aespinoza
http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/02/visions-of-the-future-dr0ne-a-webseries-about-autonomous-humanoid-soldiers/
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PayUpPal
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.

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batista
> _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.

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egypturnash
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>

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PayUpPal
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.

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egypturnash
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>

