Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Smart helmet to help search-and-rescue teams save lives faster

Hypergiant Industries, a Texas-based company, is developing a new augmented reality helmet prototype that can be used by firefighters and rescue teams to help save lives faster.

This smart helmet, called Project Orion, comes equipped with features like HUD, night vision, infrared imaging, augmented reality-style overlays and more. Its display screen also provides users with all kinds of information that can be helpful in an emergency.

For years, I’ve patented products to help improve the lives of people fighting for our country,” Hypergiant Industries CEO Ben Lamm said in a news statement. “Project Orion is, in my opinion, our best product yet, specifically designed to ensure that soldiers and those entering dangerous environments have the tools needed to be kept safe.

What Project Orion’s Iron Man-esque display may look like.
What Project Orion’s Iron Man-rescue display may look like.

To provide that safety, the high-tech, Iron Man-like helmet offers a 200-degree field of vision, a 5K and resolution, sensors for infrared, night vision, and thermal imaging, and more. It is designed to be as quick and lightweight as possible. It uses augmented reality information overlay, and its core function is to provide shape and object classification and detection, as well as masking and highlight.

Overall the helmet provides a real-time view of the world and its surroundings. Besides, it has multiple display modes and features like hand tracking and gesture-based input, and it can stream video.

Night vision in the helmet.
Night vision in the helmet.

The helmet collects the information from a number of sources, like from mounted sensors and networked data sources. Also, it can integrate with external data sources, including GPS data, mission briefing, and more.

The Project Orion helmet uses a detection module for object classification, based on a proprietary version of RC-NN. This algorithm provides the wearer with a clearer understanding of what they’re looking at. Unlike other RC-NNs (that take around 3,000 lines of code and a large amount of computing power), Hypergiant’s implementation uses just 500 lines of code and a lower amount of computing power.

Project Orion is still in the prototype stage for now, but the company claims it’s considering development in next year.