The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a new program that seeks to develop tunable obscurants designed to deliver asymmetric advantage to soldiers by improving their visibility on the battlefield while countering adversaries’ detection and vision systems.
“Coded Visibility aims to develop new types of obscurant particulates that can be tailored to allow U.S. and allied forces to see the enemy through the plume in one direction, while the adversary is unable to see through the plume in the opposite direction,” Rohith Chandrasekar, program manager at DARPA’s defense sciences office, said in a statement published Tuesday.
“We call this passive asymmetry, somewhat like the concept of privacy-window film that allows vision through glass in one direction and not the other,” Chandrasekar added.
DARPA will hold a Proposers Day for the Coded Visibility program on Oct. 21.
Chandrasekar said DARPA will also use novel materials to explore active asymmetry through the program.
