3pointD.com

(Via Clickable Culture.) According to this article in MIT’s Technology Review, the U.S. Army is about to test “a wearable health-status monitoring system” that will beam information about individual soldiers’ health, hydration, sleep and state of mind, among other things, back to a medic with a Microsoft PDA (pictured at left). Some aspects of the system sound very close to the heads-up display (HUD) found in many real-time strategy (RTS) games like Age of Empires.

A medic or commander can also view the information on a battlefield map that shows the location of each soldier and his or her health status: green (okay), yellow (look), red (look now), blue (unknown), or grey (absence of life signs for over five minutes). Or he could zero in on individual soldiers and get information about their vital signs, position, and how much they’ve slept or had to drink.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t come with a shot of the battlefield map. But this is, of course, just what happens in RTS games, as pictured below (note the mini-map in the lower left corner of the screenshot):

I doubt the U.S. Army is designing its status monitors based on Age of Empires (though it’s possible). But they are interested in the game and virtual world space. It would be interesting to see what kinds of tools might come out of a closer relationship between game developers and Army technologists.