Guns are terrifying, so making them even more so with the help of smart targeting technology and allowing people to fire them straight without even looking is totally something we should be working on, right? That’s the news out of TrackingPoint this morning: you can now fire a smart sniper rifle while facing the other way, and actually hit your target.
TrackingPoint has been at this smart targeting thing for a little while now. It has already demonstrated how it’s smart tracking scope can help compensate for bullet drift, and built a proof of concept app that could allow soldiers to shoot around corners with the help of Google Glass.
Now it’s combining the two concepts for customers, by live streaming a feed from the scope to a pair of ski goggles. Those ski goggles have a Recon-style heads-up display built in, allowing the user to see exactly what the gun sees.
In the demonstration, the shooter locks onto a target way down-range, drifts away from it on purpose, before coming back and firing a successful shot. To top it all off, the goggles meant that the shooter wasn’t looking at the target at all when he pulled the trigger.
The target was a tiny soft drink bottle, which was filled with explosives for dramatic effect.
Welcome to the terrifying future of smart weapons.