Kopin to develop AR optics for U.S. Army

Kopin Corporation, a provider of application-specific optical solutions and high-performance micro-displays for defense, enterprise, consumer and medical products, received a contract from the U.S. Army to develop novel see-through Augmented Reality (AR) display optics for dismounted soldier vision system applications.

For over 25 years, the Army has been developing systems that provide increasingly higher amounts of data to dismounted soldiers during combat operations to increase situational awareness and improve combat effectiveness. Beginning with the Land Warrior program in the late 1990s and evolving through programs such as Nett Warrior and Thermal Weapon Sight programs, and most recently with the Integrated Visual Acuity System (IVAS), the data and video imagery supplied by these solutions have been hampered by optical viewing approaches that create undesirable “side-effects” such as visual dissonance and cognitive disorder resulting from the ergonomics, human factors performance and other technical shortcomings of these systems. Under this new Army contract, Kopin will develop novel AR optics to provide an improvement over prior system approaches, with the goal of increased optical performance, daylight readability, visual and ergonomic comfort, and nighttime visibility as well as reductions in weight, size, and power consumption.

“We believe successful execution of this new Army contract can fully enable the widespread implementation of new, user-centric dismounted soldier vision products that soldiers will adopt, and finally achieve the Army’s goal of fielding a fully digitized day and night soldier head-mounted visual information system,” says Bill Maffucci, Kopin’s Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy. “We are very pleased to be selected for this important development, and we believe Kopin’s unique ability to not only develop the necessary optics but also to create a specific microdisplay that is optimized for the application will allow us to succeed where others have been unable to address the Army’s needs fully.”