Robocop In Real Life
This article is more than 2 years old
Today I find myself torn on a very serious issue: what’s more awesome, Robocop’s helmet or Kiera Cameron’s cellular memory review (CMR) body suit? The easy answer’s a cheat: obviously, you’d combine them both. And in a way, someone has.
University of New South Wales industrial design student Alfred Boyadgis has just completed one of the coolest final projects ever—a futuristic police helmet. It doesn’t just protect their noggins from motorcycle accidents, but more along the lines of Agent Cameron’s high-tech body suit in that it provides a bunch of pertinent information for the wearer.
Agent Cameron can look at a crime scene and identify and analysis fingerprints, compare a bullet to bullets from previous investigations, or deduce whether someone’s lying or nervous by monitoring their blood pressure and heart rate. While Boyadgis’s helmet doesn’t do all of that, it similarly displays helpful information in the visor that can help take down the bad guys.
The helmet, which is called Forcite, is made of D3 polyurethane that is far stronger and sturdier than standard police helmets. It includes voice-controlled GPS, a built-in radio channel, a frequency tuner, and the ability to communicate with the departmet and manage emergency situations without having access to a phone or CB. It also has a visor system that boosts vision capabilities by roughly 65%. And here’s the coolest thing—if an office wearing this helmet looks at a license plate for five seconds, the information display will indicate whether the vehicle is registered.
It’s actually pretty similar to Google Glass, but made specifically for police and in helmet form. If nothing else, I’m thinking criminals would be pretty intimated if they were approached by a cop wearing a Forcite. The only thing it’s missing is the ability to shoot lasers, but maybe that’s in the upgrade.
Forcite has already received major accolades—it’s a James Dyson Award winner for design engineering and is on display in Singapore’s Red Dot Design Museum. The Police Chief in Coral Gables, Florida is already a fan of this helmet and wants to see how it functions in the field and in tactical responses. Boyadgis thinks it’ll be about another year before the prototype is viable, and estimates that each helmet will cost just under $800.
So while some people think the future of police work involves robots catching bad guys, with gear like this, human cops stand a fighting chance.
