

You remember the scene in Iron Man when Tony lands his Mark 2 armor in some nameless Central Asian village where his former captors are terrorizing the locals? And they use civilians as human shields against the Golden Avenger? But Iron Man's sensors can effortlessly distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, so he finds, fixes and finishes the terrorists with his mini-missiles, leaving the bewildered townspeople unharmed? Download this new app and that's going to be you, soldier.

OK, so you won't pilot your own Iron Man suit. But BattleTac, a Hungarian company specializing in GPS tracking, has an app that functions as a makeshift version of Blue Force Tracker, the tech the U.S. military uses to map its friends and foes.

It's called Layar, and it's already available for your iPhone or Droid. Sure, this is gaming tech, but if you happen to be fighting for real near a Wi-Fi hotspot, Layar could come in handy. The app will quickly distinguish between your teammates ("blue" forces) and your enemies ("reds") so you know who to support and who to target.

Layar acts as a mapping system. Set it up on your phone, and then load your phone's camera. You'll see a portrait of your battle space emerge on your display.

Know your target? If so, Layar will represent it as a brown pushpin, complete with the distance to your objective. On your way there, Layar's maps will represent the other armed dudes you encounter as blue friendlies and push-pin enemies.

You can even IM with your buddies if you want to plan a movement in radio silence. That basically turns your iPhone into Land Warrior, the digital mapping-and-communications ensemble that the Army has been trying to roll out to troops since the '90s. Except Land Warrior weighs about 10 times as much and costs $48,000 per outfit.

BattleTac recommends that you mount your phone on your rifle for easy viewing, but that doesn't seem like it'll make for good texting. In any case, all this can be yours for a free download through the App Store – alas, my jailbroken iPhone can't work with Layar – or the Android Market. It uses a maximum of 4 megabytes per hour.

The drawbacks here for actual military use are obvious. You need to be fighting on a Wi-Fi enabled battlefield, for one thing, although the military has been rushing bandwidth for intelligence gear into under-networked places in Afghanistan. And while it's easy enough to plug your allies into Layar, but you'll need to separate unknown forces into enemies and civilians.

Still, the Army is looking to create and field a combat-zone version of an iPhone, part of a program called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications. The Army just finished its first app-building contest. Some of the winning entries should be only military smartphones within the year.

If the Army's going to follow Apple's closed-ecosystem model for applications, then it makes some sense to refashion and tweak existing apps for military utility. That logic only increases with military-simulation apps like Layar.

After all, you don't want to be jabbing a gloved finger onto an Army iPhone touchscreen in futility to make the device talk to your truck's Blue Force Tracker when there's a simple application to download. Just ask Tony Stark. (If he were, you know, real.)

Image: BattleTac

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