China celebrated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II with a fairly stunning display of its military might, parading hundreds armoured fighting vehicles and some 12,000 troops from the normally secretive People’s Liberation Army through Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Many of these vehicles had never appeared in public and a notable theme — one that to many eyes came as a big surprise — was the Army’s use of dramatic ‘digital’ camouflage patterns. The Chinese pageant featured columns of military vehicles covered in pixelated squares, some in shades of green and khaki, others in outlandish schemes of blue, white and black.
The pattern, which resembles the blocky graphics from the computer game Minecraft, is a stark contrast to traditional variegated “organic” camo designs that militaries have employed since the 19th Century — schemes that use blotches of complementary colours to mimic foliage and other natural features. The boldly pixelated camo, which despite some initial reluctance has seen increasing use by military forces around the world, seems counterintuitive; nothing in nature is so rigidly shaped. But it does work, and its vastly improved performance even came as a surprise to the man — a US Army officer — credited with developing it 40 years ago.
“Well when I looked at the data I think my observation was something on the order of ‘holy crap’,” recalled now-retired Lieutenant Colonel Timothy R O'Neill, PhD, when we asked him about early tests of the camo.
In the late 1970s O’Neill suggested to the US Army that square blocks of colour would disguise an armoured fighting vehicle better than large blotches. His idea was to build a pattern that would work no matter how far the vehicle is from the observer. Large patterns work well at long distances, and small patterns are better at close range. But patterns made from small squares, or pixels, can be painted to mimic both. Close up, the small patches mimic natural patterns on the scale of leaves on a tree, but from farther away, the clusters of squares create a macro texture that blends with branches, trees and shadows.
“Computer graphics were starting to come to the fore at that time — manipulated digital images,” O’Neill says. “Some people were doing work with what's called coarse quantisisation, which is simply breaking things down into squares. And it occurred to me that this would be a good way to try to imagine the texture of a background.”
Eventually O’Neill got together with three or four friends, and for about $100 did a test of digital — or what he prefers to call “texture match” — camouflage. They painted an engine-less armoured personnel carrier using a two-inch roller — and squares were the easiest shapes to paint as well as model with a computer. They posed it for pictures at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in the US state of Maryland. (Here are the beforeand aftershots he shared with us.)
The experiment exceeded expectations, but it took a long time for digital camouflage to catch on. In part that was because working out the best pattern and applying it to a vehicle was a highly labour-intensive process. (These days, computers and controlled robots can do the work.) But the greater challenge turned out to be convincing sceptical military officials that squares were better than blobs when it came to blending with a background.
“It really should have come to fruition in the late 70s,” says Guy Cramer, the President and CEO of the fantastically named HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp. He is one of the leading designers of modern camouflage.
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