Why in hell would you want a camouflage design with unnatural looking composition?
It’s actually called Marpat which stands for MARine PATtern. Per their studies, at longer distances, it’s more effective than your normal run of the mill camo.
It’s called MARPAT (MARine PATtern). It is informally known as digi-camo. It’s supposed to be more effective than traditional camouflage because of the way the eye interprets such a pattern.
Digital camouflage. Here’s a good piece from Wikipedia:
It also is more effective in low-light and night-vision imaging situations.
Basically, while having camo that looks like leaves is intuitively obvious, past a certain distance, the hard boundaries between colors actually creates a more recognizable pattern for the human eye-- and is obviously more likely to stand out when placed against surroundings that don’t match the pattern.
Digi-cam is deemed a more effective “one size fits all” method, as it breaks up the patterns at a distance when traditional camo doesn’t.
What is unnatural is straight lines.
The camo pattern, even though it looks like digitised dots, breaks up the outline of the human torso enough so that, at a distance, is hard(er) to pick out out of the background clutter.
thanks… but I don’t understand why right angles should be better than rounded corners or non-right angles for this. What am I missing?
Distance.
Take a look at a group of soldiers from 20 or 30 yards away and you will understand how well this camoflage works. Take it out to 100 yards and try to determine the number of people and location of everyone.
At those distances, you don’t see the right angles of the pixels.
It may not address the OP’s question directly, but camouflage is often not intuitive.
Just look at what they did with warships during WWI. Dazzle camouflage - Wikipedia While the zebra-looking Dazzle camouflage didn’t really make the ship harder to see, it was supposedly effective in making them hard to hit.
I remember seeing a picture or set of pictures that compared traditional camo to digital linked to this board before, but damned if I’m going to find it. But here’s a good example of MARPAT. Notice how, even at that short distance, the camo blends with the background, especially the legs against the ground and the hat against the tree. Splotches of color would show up much more easily against detailed backgrounds.
On that note, a lot of range finding equipment would require the user to be able to line up some verticle cross hairs on a target, using upright features, like the military masts.
Breaking up a ships outline helps taking accurate range measurements more difficult.
This thread has a pretty good discussion on the subject.
I noted in that thread that I had seen a picture of OD Green, Woodland and one of the new Digital pattersn in 3’x3’ squares set up against a treeline. The digital was almost invisible. I was sold from that point on.
I’ll see if I can find the article that contained that pic. Might take a bit though…
Note that the article says that the technique didn’t necessarily work as intended: “The British Admiralty concluded it had no effect on submarine attacks, but proved to be a morale boost for crews. It also increased the morale of people not involved in fighting; hundreds of wonderfully coloured ships in dock was nothing ever seen before or since.” Who doesn’t like a little dazzle?
Try squinting your eyes and looking at This. Still pretty easy to tell it’s camo, right?
Now squint your eyes and look at This. Much more difficult to tell what you’re looking at.
I think this sufficiently demonstrates the effectiveness of digicamo:
lol. On first glance I was like: "so what?, it’s an ugly looking couch. "
If you’re close enough to see the pixels, you’re close enough to see what they’re hiding.
I’m not an expert, but I think that the only reason it’s made of pixels is that it was designed using a computer. I think that if a pattern was that detailed and that random without having square edges, it would work just as well.
We have always been at war with Legoland.
Digicamo has a richer spacial frequency content than older camo. Basically, instead of large blotches, it also has many kinds of smaller details. Even the corners of the pixels count as especially fine details.
That doesn’t mean digicamo is ideal. It just means it sucks less than the older kind. Frankly, I’m stumped why a good exhaustive can’t find the ideal camouflage that is natural-looking at close and distant range, incorporates patterns at all spacial frequencies, and has good diversity in color as well.
I guess either noone’s tried to find the ideal camo, or form takes precedence over function, or camouflage doesn’t really matter much either way in conflict, or an army actually DOESN’T want especially effective camouflage. It would increase friendly fire and be mean to the enemy. If the US wanted all its soldiers to have really great camo, they could glue plastic grass and other such things to themselves like ambush teams do (hopefully without affecting weight all that much).