Los Angeles-based startup Hawkeye Systems is already in the movies because Sony Pictures Studios uses its technology. But Hawkeye’s leaders want the military to use their tech as well.
The company is offering high resolution body-worn — and K9-worn — cameras to Special Operations Command and has longer term ambitions to provide airborne ISR systems and imagery.
Hawkeye’s wearables have been demonstrated for SOCOM at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in 2018. Corby Marshall, the company’s chief executive officer, said military representatives who saw the technology were “blown away.”
SOCOM officials, for their part, acknowledge evaluating Hawkeye’s cameras but stressed that the organization “currently does not have a program of record for body-worn cameras.”
But what may have impressed them?
As opposed to the consumer-grade wearables SOCOM uses from manufacturers such as GoPro and Axon, Hawkeye Systems promises the possibility of higher image resolution, a 360-degree field-of-view and the potential to pair denser image data with artificial intelligence.
“We’re working to create a technology that takes [resolution] from 720 [pixels] to 4K, 8K,” Marshall said. “It’s wildly better with some AI features around physical, biometric and chemical sensors on the same camera that the dog is wearing.”
Source: Could a camera-wearing dog pick you out in a crowd? SOCOM might found out.