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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
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| Hands Free Helmet | ||
| The helmet of a powered suit has controls activated by head movements. |
The powered suit or exoskeleton was controlled entirely by careful feedback to your usual muscle movements. So, how could you manipulate the suit controls?
| Since your head is the one part of your body not involved in the pressure receptors controlling the suit's muscles, you use your head -- your jaw muscles, your chin, your neck -- to switch things for you and thereby leave your hands free to fight. A chin plate handles all visual displays the way the jaw switch handles the audios. All displays are thrown on a mirror in front of your forehead from where the work is actually going on above and back of your head. All this helmet gear makes you look like a hydrocephalic gorilla but, with luck, the enemy won't live long enough to be offended by your appearance, and it is a very convenient arrangement; you can flip through your several types of radar displays quicker than you can change channels to avoid a commercial -- catch a range & bearing, locate your boss, check your flank men, whatever. |
| Technovelgy from Starship Troopers,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1959 Additional resources -
|
The first head-up displays (HUDs) were created during WWII. An early example of what would now be termed a head-up display was the Projector System of the British AI Mk VIII air interception radar fitted to some de Havilland Mosquito night fighters, where the radar display was projected onto the aircraft's windscreen along with the artificial horizon, allowing the pilots to perform interceptions without taking their eyes from the windscreen.
Compare to the more modern sfnal ideas like the overlay specs from Charles Stross' 2007 novel Halting State and the smart contact lenses from Fast Times at Fairmont High by Vernor Vinge (2001), and somewhat earlier, the DreamTime contacts from Niven and Barnes' 1992 novel The California Voodoo Game.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Starship Troopers
More Ideas
and Technology by Robert Heinlein
Tech news articles related to Starship Troopers
Tech news articles related to works by Robert Heinlein
Hands Free Helmet-related
news articles:
- Preorder Recon Jet - It's Heavy Duty Glass
- Navdy HeadUp Display (HUD) For Your Car
- Squad X Core Technologies For Infantry
| Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade |
| Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones |
| China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun |
| Is The Seattle Ultrasonics C-200 A Heinlein Vibroblade? |
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
