Someone at DARPA likes Avatar
 

To the tune of $7m.
Pentagon's Project 'Avatar': Same as the Movie, but With Robots Instead of Aliens | Danger Room | Wired.com

One word sums my opinion on this, really: want! :party:

Heh, well. About time they started work on such an idea. Sad though that they need a movie, of all things, to get the motivation.

7m isn't that much :( - but at least it's a start.

Why is that sad?

http://www.everythingusb.com/images/...tor_news_1.jpg

http://gandhiappliances.com/images/l...p-8220_LRG.jpg

Ahh but Dick Tracy had his wrist radio LOOONG before Star Trek came out.
Niri Te

You'd think some of the world's best and highest funded scientists would be able to come up with an original idea.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/gimages/wristphone1.jpg

Considering that not even JC himself has any idea how to build an avatar, I don't think originality matters that much. Implementation is everything.

Guys, we do still remember that "avatar" is a word, right? :P Not sure there's a more concise title for a project to make avatars.

Yep - the word is fairly old, I think one of the earliest uses was in Ender's Game, and it was all over the internet before Avatar itself.

soon everyone who plays cod or bf will be able to fulfill their life long dream of becoming a soldier :awesome:

OR they could just do what I did, and JOIN the REAL Army, have the Army pay to train them how to fly Helicopters, and spend the rest of their Military career GETTING PAID to fly 20 million dollar aerial hot rods. REALITY, what a concept.
Niri Te

I don't get it.

If the future of warfare is supposedly going to be to having a bunch of proxy robot soldiers fighthing each other, why not scrap the whole 'war' thing altogether?

Humans are hilarious.

It'd probably be an order of magnitude cheaper - not to mention more efficient - in the long run to use remote-controlled Avatars than actual people. Assuming you can actually get the interface to the soldier working properly, I'm not sure what advantage a soldier in the field could have over this idea.

Because then you don't get the loot.
(I can't really understand why you're asking this unless you think the point of war is to kill people. That's just a means to an end. :P)