4 ms·

I'm curious how the real time overlay works. It's probably somewhat useful for certain aspects of situational awareness, but I'm not convinced that it's that us

I'm curious how the real time overlay works. It's probably somewhat useful for certain aspects of situational awareness, but I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality. "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. In any case I remember recently overhearing police activity where my local (US) police were trying to catch someone with a helicopter. They had FLIR and all sorts of goodies and they somehow managed to lose the guy. The prevailing theory of these cops was that the guy had just called an uber to get away.

tetha 4y ago
Mh. It looks very useful to me. The helicopter is not responsible for guiding a squad car to the single square meter something is happening, they just need to get the squad car into visual range. Making calls like "Suspect turning left into foo street" is massively simplified with this overlay.
bdcravens 4y ago
I assume the police have a GPS in their car, as well as likely know the area (especially since high crime areas are often excessively patrolled, for better or worse).
uoaei 4y ago
> unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. I mean, I don't exactly hold cops in high regard, but they do drive around in the city all day so I'd expect they have some sense of geography.
- monkpit 4y ago
  Wouldn’t it be relatively straightforward to link this helicopter thing to another app on the side of the ground officer? The camera knows the point on the map wherever the crosshairs is, just ping a GPS point from the camera interface and transmit the lat/lon to the ground unit’s GPS.
linsomniac 4y ago
I'm assuming the overlay works by GPS location of the copter, and camera feedback to say what direction it's pointed and the zoom level. Combine that with a topo map of the area and OpenStreetMaps, and it's straightfoward to map the camera output image to what part of the ground that represents, and generate the overlays.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah I would imagine it is all done in-camera. The camera has a GPS unit and IMU. It knows its zoom level and where it is pointing. The rest is easy.
  - froh 4y ago
    > the rest is easy ...said the physicist ;-) https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
jcpst 4y ago
> "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. That does not sound that hard if you know how the area is laid out. Especially for people who drive around a lot, like cops, delivery drivers, taxis… If you told me a street and a block number in my city I would know where to go in probably a second or two.
runlevel1 4y ago
> other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are Police (and firefighters) know their streets really, really well.
goodpoint 4y ago
> I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality. Tons of similar technology is designed to simply look fancy and movie-like and the whole point is to justify hefty price tags. It's useful at pocketing tax money and keeping the surveillance and military-industrial business afloat. Unsurprisingly 99% of comments in this thread are missing the point...

tetha 4y ago

Mh. It looks very useful to me. The helicopter is not responsible for guiding a squad car to the single square meter something is happening, they just need to get the squad car into visual range. Making calls like "Suspect turning left into foo street" is massively simplified with this overlay.

bdcravens 4y ago

I assume the police have a GPS in their car, as well as likely know the area (especially since high crime areas are often excessively patrolled, for better or worse).

uoaei 4y ago

> unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. I mean, I don't exactly hold cops in high regard, but they do drive around in the city all day so I'd expect they have some sense of geography.

monkpit 4y ago
Wouldn’t it be relatively straightforward to link this helicopter thing to another app on the side of the ground officer? The camera knows the point on the map wherever the crosshairs is, just ping a GPS point from the camera interface and transmit the lat/lon to the ground unit’s GPS.

linsomniac 4y ago

I'm assuming the overlay works by GPS location of the copter, and camera feedback to say what direction it's pointed and the zoom level. Combine that with a topo map of the area and OpenStreetMaps, and it's straightfoward to map the camera output image to what part of the ground that represents, and generate the overlays.

IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah I would imagine it is all done in-camera. The camera has a GPS unit and IMU. It knows its zoom level and where it is pointing. The rest is easy.
- froh 4y ago
  > the rest is easy ...said the physicist ;-) https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/

jcpst 4y ago

> "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. That does not sound that hard if you know how the area is laid out. Especially for people who drive around a lot, like cops, delivery drivers, taxis… If you told me a street and a block number in my city I would know where to go in probably a second or two.

runlevel1 4y ago

> other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are Police (and firefighters) know their streets really, really well.

goodpoint 4y ago

> I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality. Tons of similar technology is designed to simply look fancy and movie-like and the whole point is to justify hefty price tags. It's useful at pocketing tax money and keeping the surveillance and military-industrial business afloat. Unsurprisingly 99% of comments in this thread are missing the point...