16 ms·
The story behind China's 'Minecraft' military camouflage
- diskcat 11y agoNext somebody is going to be telling me their camera has 20 mega minecrafts.
- damian2000 11y agoShouldn't minecraft be replaced with 'pixelated' ... its really got nothing to do with minecraft has it?
- jonnathanson 11y agoThe article's actual headline (though not the link title) uses 'Minecraft' in quotation marks. It's saying that the pixelated pattern resembles a series of Minecraft blocks -- not that there is any literal connection to Minecraft.
- seanmcdirmid 11y agoBut minecraft is most definitely based on voxels (3D), not the pixels used in the camo (2D).
- rtkwe 11y agoThey're talking about the textures on the voxels which are blocky and pixelated like the tank textures. The same is true for a lot of games these days with the resurgence of 8-bit graphics but it's the one people will know the most. http://i.imgur.com/yyKp9SC.png http://i.imgur.com/yyKp9SC.png
- seanmcdirmid 11y agomakes sense, thanks for explaining it to me!
- optimuspaul 11y agoit's because the textures on the minecraft blocks look like the camo. has nothing to do with the blocks.
- jonnathanson 11y agoWe're basically splitting hairs at this point. The camo pattern looks like the textures on the Minecraft blocks, or vice versa. It's not that the pattern literally looks like it's made of Minecraft blocks, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. This is one of the silliest arguments I've ever been involved in on the internet, and that's saying something. :) Can we just say "They used the word 'Minecraft' in the title because the camo kinda sorta looks like Minecraft textures" and move on with our lives?
- thenadamgoes 11y agoYeah. It's just digital camo. Its been used for a long time.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoNope. But this story is all over the internet today because the headline mentions Minecraft. Clickbait works.
- josefresco 11y agoAn entire article about digital camouflage and they offer one measly 245 px wide photo 3/4 down the article. The linked article about the Chinese military parade only featured 1 decent image. sigh
- DanBC 11y agoThere are 3 images in the article, with a banner header image too.
- mahranch 11y agoHow is this a story behind "China's" camouflage? It's clearly a small blurb about the history of digital camo (or "texture match" camo") in general. The U.S has been using this for a long time, as well as dozens of other countries. Yet, the article doesn't do much to talk about China's application other than noting they too, use it (sometimes).
- cvarjas 11y agoAgreed, mainly just some history of digital camo. Camopedia [1] has similar information, and it looks like China has been using these patterns since 2007. [1] http://camopedia.org/index.php?title=Digital_patterns http://camopedia.org/index.php?title=Digital_patterns
- nether 11y agoThe US Army is ditching the digital pattern for a more traditional, splotchy pattern, Scorpion W2: http://tacticalgear.com/ocp-acus http://tacticalgear.com/ocp-acus
- thearn4 11y agoHaving left the Army just as the awful ACUs were being phased in, I have to wonder which politicians and/or general officers got their palms greased for that to have become the uniform pattern.
- 33W 11y agoThat's a fantastic page. I was in from '03-'08, and was issued woodland BDUs, desert DCUs, and finally the UCP ACUs. Multicam and the new OCP pattern have come since. I had 2 versions of the PT uniform (which have changed once or twice since), and narrowly avoided having to purchase the new dress uniform. Overall, the Army needs to find a uniform that it likes and stick with it. Particularly for something that does not affect combat effectiveness (PT, Dress), a single style should be good for decades. I think that the Army should define a garrison uniform that they can stick with, something along the lines of the BDU with the additional pockets of the ACU. Then define a combat uniform for different terrain or combat theaters as needed.
- zeveb 11y ago> Particularly for something that does not affect combat effectiveness (PT, Dress), a single style should be good for decades. Completely agree. > I think that the Army should define a garrison uniform that they can stick with, something along the lines of the BDU with the additional pockets of the ACU. The garrison uniform should be what the Navy terms a 'service uniform': polished leather shoes, trousers, a long- or short-sleeved blouse depending on the weather, and a cover, with optional coat and tie. It doesn't ever need to change, except maybe slightly in cut to keep up with civilian styles. Camouflage should only be worn when actually fighting, or training to fight. Anyone sitting at a desk outside of a war zone should be wearing a service uniform, not camo.
- mudetroit 11y agoI was more perplexed about the camouflaged vehicles being bright blue...
- rangibaby 11y agoThere are all different colors of camo depending on the environment it will be used in.
- DanBC 11y agoWhere are tanks going to be used that bright blue is a good idea?
- huahaiy 11y agoIn the sea. When conducting a beachhead assault, these amphibious light tanks will come out of some giant amphibious assault ships, which are typically parked far away from the beachhead so enemy on land cannot see them. So the effect will be that a swarm of floating tanks suddenly appears and quickly approaches the land. This concept is obviously designed for an island invasion scenario.
- ryanlol 11y agoMakes it harder to spot them against the sky.
- huahaiy 11y agoThose are amphibious fighting vehicles, used for landing from the sea. The sea, as we know, are blue colored.
- DanBC 11y agoThese are amphibious? http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/1600_640/images/live/p0/3n/y4/p03ny4g9.jpg http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/1600_640/images/live/p0/3...
- 99_00 11y agoDigital camouflage has been used for a long time, with it's roots going back before WW2. Countries like the US and Canada who have advanced the technology. The main advantage seems to be it has more than one optimal viewing distance. From wikipedia: Traditional single scale patterns work well in their optimal range from the observer, however an observer too close or too far away will not see the pattern optimally. Nature itself is very often fractal, where plants and rock formations exhibit similar patterns across several magnitudes of scale. The idea behind multi scale patterns is both to mimic the cross-scale self-similarity of nature, and also to offer camouflage at close-range in addition to the traditional combat range camouflage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_camouflage
- sevenless 11y agoIf "digital" camouflage with patterns of squares works so well, why don't animals use it?
- oh_sigh 11y agoIf internal combustion engines work so well, why don't animals use it?
- sevenless 11y agoEngines (or wheels) need independent moving parts, high temperatures, which is hardly compatible with what's allowed by anatomy and biochemistry. But there's nothing obviously stopping animals from evolving any particular pattern of skin markings.
- dsmithatx 11y agoIt seems like something is in fact stopping animals from evolving a pattern such as digital camo. I would think that entropy would lend more to the splotchy skin colorings we see on virtually all animals (with hair) versus square "digital" style blocks.
- mikeash 11y agoSkin markings are pretty complicated for an animal. Each cell somehow needs to "know" what color it should be, potentially different from its neighbors, without carrying any information unique to that cell. Imagine billions of LEDs, and you want to make them display a picture, but you separately program them, you can't address them individually, and you can't even really have them talk to each other. You can sort of flood them with broadcasts of different strengths to influence how they turn on. The sorts of patterns you could form would be fairly limited.
- gaius 11y agoBecause a zebra is hiding from a tiger, since long before humans with ranged weapons were on the scene.
- 11y ago
- hackbinary 11y agoI'm not sure why blocky camo seems so revolutionary. It was proven highly effective in WWI by both the American and British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
- bradford 11y agoOne, it's not clear that you can compare dazzle camouflage to digital camouflage. The design, as well as the visual attributes, are very different. Two, the effectiveness of Dazzle was debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage#Effectiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage#Effectivenes...
- GuiA 11y agoShip camouflage, particularly "dazzle camouflage", is another example of a counterintuitive pattern at first making sense; see the first picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
- cptskippy 11y agoDazzle wasn't intended to hide the ship but rather make it difficult to ascertain it's class, speed and heading.
- vegardx 11y agoAnd with modern cruise missiles, where they acquire the target autonomously, identifying the best target (value, easiest, etc) and attack vector without human intervention, camouflage like this will once against be quite important.
- geon 11y agoAlso if you care about your privacy. Camouflage from face detection: https://cvdazzle.com https://cvdazzle.com
- hackbinary 11y agoI'm sorry, but you're statement is contradictory: a.) Dazzle wasn't intended to hide the ship b.) make it difficult to ascertain it's [sic] class, speed and heading Hide = hard to find Difficult = hard Ascertain = to know, to find out, to determine The point of camouflage is to hide 'information', and while that can be to make something blend in with its location/surroundings, it can also certainly be to make it appear to be something else, or doing something different from what it is actually doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage
- kbenson 11y agoYou're glossing over that what's being disputed is whether you are hiding the ship, or attributes of the ship. In one case, the purpose to prevent detection, in the other, it's to prevent useful action after detection.
- jonathankoren 11y agoGizmodo had a pretty good write up on the history digicam. It's interesting that the US Army abandoned it after they tried a one-camp-to-rule-them-all. Instead of helping soldiers hide in Afghanistan, it helped them be visible. http://gizmodo.com/the-history-of-invisibility-and-the-future-of-camouflag-1487381235 http://gizmodo.com/the-history-of-invisibility-and-the-futur...
- electrograv 11y agoI have to wonder why they all have the same digital pattern. This seems like a terrible idea. It would be almost trivial to make a computer vision algorithm to pick these out against any background, as long as you know what digital pattern you're looking for.
- narrator 11y agoI bet these tanks looks low-res from satellites.
- rwhitman 11y agoSatellite / drone camouflage. I'm certainly not a military expert, but it seems fairly obvious that China's military would benefit from being able to hide from high altitude surveillance. They're not doing a whole lot with these vehicles in combat at the moment, but masking their position and numbers seems like a pretty important objective for someone trying to build up an arsenal without escalating tension.