Depends where you are! ITAR/etc means the markets fucking confusing.
In the US it’s possible to get really nice L3Harris Gen3 tubes, whereas in Europe you are more likely to find Photonis Echo or similar - which are really nice.
There’s the older school green phosphor tubes, and more modern white phosphor tubes - the WP ones are better in terms of contrast, and IMO easier on the eyes.
The set I have the most time on uses Gen3 WP Photonis Echo tubes, and is really nice, but I’m told it doesn’t hold up great compared to the ones available in the US.
There’s some Chinese tubes on the market now that are supposedly rather good, but I’ve not played with those.
I’d not be surprised tbh given the timing of the sudden leap in Chinese commercial tube quality.
While the general science behind Gen3 NVG is pretty well known, having a few sets in hand would have massively sped up development, and there’s now a couple of suppliers knocking out really quite respectable tubes.
Oh this is a fun one, night camouflage is actually a bad idea and makes you more observable! The intuitive solution to low light camo is black right, so you can "blend into shadow" right? But the problem is that you're not "blending into shadow", you're blending into your surroundings that happen to be in shadow, so you actually want to be the same color even if it's a light color. Otherwise you stand out by being too dark!
*There are other considerations of course, reflectivity (including in the NIR spectrum) is a much larger concern in low light conditions for instance.
I always hated the biocular NVGs when I was in, but that was back when the conversation was between PVS-14s and PVS-7s. Hopefully the dual tube design helps with the nausea I had trying to drive with PVS-7s in Grafenwöhr back in the day.
You will find Veritasium's video on night vision goggles [1] very interesting. He explains well how they work, and the pros and cons of each implementation and generation.
In particular you can see just how much better (in terms of quality / resolution, not latency) the thermal vision is. Absolutely not surprising that they're trying to merge the two solutions to get the best of both worlds - fast updates from amplified visual, higher fidelity / resolution / range from the thermal channel.
These sort of questions are always a bit meaningless.
Do you mean, if they would place an order for +1 unit today, what would they be invoiced for that specific unit? This question is quite irrelevant, because they don't order them one by one.
Or, what is the total cost of the project, averaged out onto each unit that has currently been ordered and delivered? Or just ordered? Or planned to be ordered? Each question has a vastly different answer.
Or, what is the projected final average cost per unit, once the device has been deprecated in favor of the next generation?
These projects always consist of the price of the hardware (which changes), the developmental costs, the internal costs of the staffers in the army (air force? pentagon?) working on the project, maintenance of the device, training for the device, repairs of broken devices, and so forth.
Nevertheless, the excessive price tags of MIC toys is something the public should be privy to. And the terms you're looking for are "amortized" and "TCO".
The public cries about the cost of these things but they also cry when our boys get killed. I'm an optimist. When I see expensive NVGs or other kit I see more soldiers and marines making it home to their families.
My unit got a couple sets of combination image intensifying/thermal goggles back in 2008 to try out (long before the AN/PSQ-42s were even in development). The thing that stuck out most to me was how much everyone disliked them without really being able to articulate why.
There was also a rumor that if you turned your head fast enough with them on they’d cause you to vomit and pass out, which is almost certainly not true but boy did we believe it.
> There was also a rumor that if you turned your head fast enough with them on they’d cause you to vomit and pass out, which is almost certainly not true but boy did we believe it.
Sounds like (slightly exaggerated) VR sickness symptoms, e.g. when there's too much latency between head movement and vision updates. Some people are more sensitive to this than others.
We used the PVS-7 monocular devices in the Contingency Response Groups. While it wasn’t anything I’d want to live in, it works ok enough to drive a HMMWV at night safely
These new ones would be wild, I’ll see if I can get a demo this year somewhere.
So an IIT doesn’t really have a “refresh rate”, but the thermal component does.
I don’t get any motion sickness with Gen3 IIT’s even moving fast, but with digital systems there’s a latency in refresh rate that becomes very disorienting.
The thermal part of the combined system is digital - in the units I’ve looked at, the image from the thermal is “projected” into the IIT’s lens. So while the image from the IIT alone is lag free, the thermal overlay does have lag and can mess you up a bit.
I should have specified, I meant with the overlay. Do you have any idea what the rate might have been? It's a pretty gucci piece of gear, but in 2008 everything thermal was. A 10 Hz overlay would work fine for observation (those monoculars everyone has now can be about that shitty), but movement would be gross.
I have no idea what it would have been back then, but the current “best” ones I’ve seen on the civilian market have a refresh rate of 50hz and you still experience some “issues”.
I’ve played with some older kit that was somewhere around 14hz or so and was fucking awful, felt like being ill after walking around in them!
Basically it said infrared goggles use digital processing, so there's at least one frame of lag for every image, which can cause those issues. Image intensifying googles are totally analog so there's no lag to avoid that issue.
> so there's at least one frame of lag for every image
Well, 24 fps vs 120 fps would technically matter, to the point where at a high enough frame rate you could not possibly tell the difference; I suspect it's more like 48 fps (if it's a constant 48 fps) than 120 *
If there's a digital component to these which causes frame delay, I wonder what the FPS is. Competitive gamers say 120 vs 60 makes a substantial difference. Since the use case is literally first-person shooting...
I could be wrong but I believe 120 vs 60 makes a huge difference only because the framrtate is not actually constant and in certain cases/scenes the framerate can drop significantly, whereas an IR google I immagine will render at a constant framerate regardless of scene.
Perhaps it has to do with the optical center being offset? I don't have one to test it out, but if it works like it says online, the optical center would move from somewhere in the middle of your eye to somewhere in the middle of the device, which would cause changes in parallax, and therefore mismatch in movement between the inner ear and what is inferred from the eyes. Maybe that's what causes the discomfort.
I’m stuck with PVS-7s and 14s. The nerd part of me is amazed looking at the stars with them, but the soldier part of me is frustrated having to move with them. I can’t imagine having I^2 and thermal imaging in a single NOD.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 64.3 ms ] threadThe give-and-take relationship between this technology and video games is ... something.
I can’t understate how fucking awesome the technology is, even the stuff available in civilian market.
In the US it’s possible to get really nice L3Harris Gen3 tubes, whereas in Europe you are more likely to find Photonis Echo or similar - which are really nice.
There’s the older school green phosphor tubes, and more modern white phosphor tubes - the WP ones are better in terms of contrast, and IMO easier on the eyes.
The set I have the most time on uses Gen3 WP Photonis Echo tubes, and is really nice, but I’m told it doesn’t hold up great compared to the ones available in the US.
There’s some Chinese tubes on the market now that are supposedly rather good, but I’ve not played with those.
I wonder if they reverse engineered the stuff we left behind in Afghanistan.
While the general science behind Gen3 NVG is pretty well known, having a few sets in hand would have massively sped up development, and there’s now a couple of suppliers knocking out really quite respectable tubes.
Even the chassis for them with a “install your own IIT” is stupid expensive, and 3DP versions of the chassis just aren’t there yet.
Tan is useful because it turns out it's a element of both temperature and arid environments.
*There are other considerations of course, reflectivity (including in the NIR spectrum) is a much larger concern in low light conditions for instance.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAeJHAFjwPM&t
Do you mean, if they would place an order for +1 unit today, what would they be invoiced for that specific unit? This question is quite irrelevant, because they don't order them one by one.
Or, what is the total cost of the project, averaged out onto each unit that has currently been ordered and delivered? Or just ordered? Or planned to be ordered? Each question has a vastly different answer.
Or, what is the projected final average cost per unit, once the device has been deprecated in favor of the next generation?
These projects always consist of the price of the hardware (which changes), the developmental costs, the internal costs of the staffers in the army (air force? pentagon?) working on the project, maintenance of the device, training for the device, repairs of broken devices, and so forth.
There are follow up orders, numbers are less firm on that one.
Which cameras cost less than 39k that are manufactured at less than 2500 per year?
Sounds like (slightly exaggerated) VR sickness symptoms, e.g. when there's too much latency between head movement and vision updates. Some people are more sensitive to this than others.
These new ones would be wild, I’ll see if I can get a demo this year somewhere.
I don’t get any motion sickness with Gen3 IIT’s even moving fast, but with digital systems there’s a latency in refresh rate that becomes very disorienting.
The thermal part of the combined system is digital - in the units I’ve looked at, the image from the thermal is “projected” into the IIT’s lens. So while the image from the IIT alone is lag free, the thermal overlay does have lag and can mess you up a bit.
I’ve played with some older kit that was somewhere around 14hz or so and was fucking awful, felt like being ill after walking around in them!
Basically it said infrared goggles use digital processing, so there's at least one frame of lag for every image, which can cause those issues. Image intensifying googles are totally analog so there's no lag to avoid that issue.
Well, 24 fps vs 120 fps would technically matter, to the point where at a high enough frame rate you could not possibly tell the difference; I suspect it's more like 48 fps (if it's a constant 48 fps) than 120 *