Night vision head-mounted display from SA Photonics doubles field of view
Los Gatos, CA--A High Resolution Night Vision System (HRNVS) developed by SA Photonics in partnership with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the U.S. Army's Night Vision Laboratory, and Vision Systems International (San Jose, CA), offers more than twice the field of view of most existing night-vision systems. The HRNVS technology will be presented at the 2011 SPIE Defense and Security Symposium in Orlando, FL on Thursday, April 28. The HRNVS wide-field-of-view digital night vision head-mounted display is for use by commercial and military pilots of fixed-wing airplanes or rotorcraft.
Night vision has been a key enabling technology for the U.S. military for more than 30 years, allowing U.S. pilots to "own the night" and fly after dark missions in relative safety. This dominance of the nighttime environment has often been the decisive factor in battlefield victory. Yet there remain substantial shortcomings to night vision systems, including low-resolution digital displays and constrained field of view. Surveys of U.S. Air Force pilots have found that the most frequently requested improvement for night vision goggles is a larger field of view.
SA Photonics, a developer of optics solutions for the military, is leveraging its experience with night vision and head-mounted displays with the HRNVS to provide pilots high-resolution night-vision imagery over an 82.5 degree field of view—more than double the field of view of most existing night-vision systems. The HRNVS has other advantages compared to existing systems, such as reduced peripheral obscuration, reduced forward projection and swept volume, zero-halo, and the capabilities for digital image enhancement, recording night vision imagery and overlaying symbology.
"At SA Photonics, we are serious about improving pilot safety while increasing performance in both commercial and military cockpits." said Michael Browne, SA Photonics' VP of product development, who is scheduled to present the technology at SPIE's DSS in Orlando. "HRNVS advances the state of the art of night vision goggles and head mounted displays and will provide a significant improvement in nighttime situational awareness."
SA Photonics' expertise includes optical communications, ruggedized photonics hardware, optomechanical design, and complex analog and digital engineering for space, marine, avionic and ground applications.
SOURCE: SA Photonics; www.saphotonics.com
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Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.