The Army's New Night Vision Goggles Let Soldiers Look Around Corners

It's like shooting from the hip — but with deadly accuracy.

AR Night Vision

The US Army recently showed off its latest night vision goggles — and they're straight out of a video game.

A video, as spotted by The Warzone, shows soldiers firing M4 carbines straight from the hip, without looking into the gun's sights, in the middle of the night. That's thanks to a first-person feed of what the gun is pointing at being sent directly to to the night vision goggles.

 

Enhance!

The Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular combines an image intensifier, a vacuum tube that increases the intensity of available light, and a thermal imaging sensor. The resulting video feed is stunningly detailed and allows soldiers to make out individual targets with ease.

Thanks to the feed, soldiers can even point their rifles around corners and get a glimpse of what's ahead on the battlefield. The goggles also allow their wearer to seamlessly switch between the feed and the primary view of the goggles themselves.

Augmenting Reality

According to the goggles' maker L3Harris Technologies, additional information could be piped into the goggles' view, effectively turning it into a heads-up display. For instance, soldiers could keep track of drones in the sky to identify targets in the distance.

It's not the only augmented reality vision system the Army has been working on. The Pentagon has also been funding the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, which is being built on a custom version of Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset.

READ MORE: The View Through The Army's New Night Vision Goggles Looks Straight Out Of A Video Game [The Drive]

More on night vision: The Military is Developing Augmented Reality Night Vision Goggles