GITS: SAC - "Testation" - On Augmented Vision

In the second episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a dying man's brain is put into a war tank and Public Security Section 9 is tasked with stopping it. Because this tank uses advanced technology, the team finds that their normal tactics are ineffective, and must rely on ever-changing methods to combat the situation. One of the first methods the team tries, however, is having a sniper deliver an armor-piercing round into the target.

That sniper's name is Saito, and while his body is 90% human, he has one eyeball that is 100% mechanical. When it's inactive, it looks like an eyepatch covering the eye, but when he uses it, it flips up to reveal a highly efficient camera lens.

This lens has several augments to it. It can see well over 2 kilometers away. It can be used to apply filters over one's field of vision; for example, Saito uses it to overlay a topographic map in order to estimate slopes from far away. This gives unprecedented depth perception at long range. Sensors within the eye also display wind velocity. Finally, Saito can use satellite connections to lock-on to a target.


While most of the battle-related features would be useless to a citizen, everything else is rather interesting. With the release of Google Glasses, we are already one step closer to this degree of augmented reality. So the question becomes what to do with it.

We use hand-tools routinely to measure everything from distance to angle to volume and so much more. The ability to use sensors within a viewing device to calculate these things for us gives us far more flexibility and eliminates the need for such tools. Being able to simply look at an object and record these measurements in real-time ensures accuracy and precision.

But more than that, having filter overlays in our field of vision is valuable in helping us interpret terrain and architectural features, especially if those overlays could be created on-the-fly.

If you have ever used a GPS (Global Positioning System), one thing you may notice is that it records your movements, and overlays your path on a mapped backdrop. This is not always accurate and often there is an error of 10-50 feet. Having visual devices do the mapping at ground-level decreases this error by generating the map according to distance from origin, similar to how maps used to be created in the game MineCraft.

While these maps would not be used for world-scale geodatabases, they would be very useful for small-scale GIS (Geographic Information System) projects, where you need a sample that's only a few square miles or less.