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Friday, January 30, 2009
BulletFlight iPhone app aims for accuracy with military snipers
By Galen Moore
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Think you can’t live without your iPhone? Meet Robert Silvers, a Boston artist who has written an iPhone app that is truly a matter of life or death. The application, called BulletFlight, turns an iPhone or an iPod Touch into a ballistics calculator, designed to help military snipers kill from up to 1,000 yards away.
Until he turned his hand to small-arms accessories, Silvers was making photographic mosaics. You might have seen his work on the cover of the Dec. 6, 2004, issue of Sports Illustrated, celebrating the Red Sox’s World Series win that year.
Silvers was tapped for the armaments job by a friend of a friend. Trey Knight, vice president of new technology at Knight’s Armament Co., a Florida company that makes sniper rifles for the U.S. Army and Navy, originally conceived the application, then sought out developers.
At first, Silvers was reluctant. “I felt kind of rusty for programming because I had been focusing on artwork for so many years,” he said.
The computer program Silvers wrote for his 1996 master’s thesis in media arts and science at MIT arranges thousands of tiny photographs as mosaic tiles. Seen together, from a distance, the photos blend together into a mosaic image. Silvers adjusts the results by hand to get the effect he desires.
“I got the sense I better do something else or I’m going to fall into too comfortable a position,” said the Plymouth native, a one-time target shooter.
Thus, BulletFlight. Available through Apple Inc.’s iTunes App Store for $11.99, it allows the user to input windspeed, atmospheric conditions and distance from an intended target. The application then dictates how the user can compensate for factors like “bullet drop.”
Anyone with a credit card can download BulletFlight — but the $10,000 rifles it was designed for are not currently sold retail. Knight’s production capacity is taken up by Pentagon orders, Knight explained.
Knight, a self-described “long-time Apple fan,” said the app isn’t likely to make soldiers faster in the field, but it may improve their training. If snipers can aim better from farther away, that can keep soldiers safe from enemy fire, Knight said.
“There’s so little mechanical engineering and mechanical development in this country, but we do have a large number of people with the skill sets of the computer industry,” he said. “So we are wanting to tap into this great resource of American students and (computer) engineers and use their skill set to basically help out the U.S. soldier.”
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