Kopin Corporation announced it has received a contract from the U.S. Army to develop novel see-through Augmented Reality 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.