It was only a matter of time before Oculus Rift would be deployed to some terrifying militaristic end, and Norway may have been the first to do so. The video above shows Norwegian soldiers driving a tank with the virtual reality mask, which takes input from four cameras outside the vehicle to give the driver a seamless first-person view.
“Normally you would be more or less blind, because there is armor all around you,” Ola Petter Odden of the army’s Combat Lab says in the video above. “With this system, you can see just as well if you were seeing out the hatch.” Because the screen strains the eyes, he continues, it would only be used in situations in which the crew might be fired upon.
In case that doesn’t evoke combat video games enough on its own, the creators say it could also carry a Battlefield-style heads-up display. “With our software, you can add elements we are used to from games,” says Daniel Ervik. “You can have a map; you can show each orientation; how much you tilt; the speed.”
“Those who play Battlefield can see much better than you do in an actual vehicle,” he adds.
