Promethean Vision In The Video Game Halo

In the video game Halo, Promethean Vision enables the players to look through solid walls at an object. At first glance, the properties of light as it interacts with most common materials may make this concept seem impossible to recreate in real life. However, by looking further into the physics of optics, the concept of see-through vision may not need to be confined solely to science fiction. Indeed, this technology may be replicable in the real world, to a limited extent, though it may not function the same way Promethean Vision does in the game Halo.

In order to understand how this is possible, first we must look at the basic properties of light, and what makes an object opaque. Light travels in a straight line out from its source unless it undergoes an interaction with another substance. For …show more content…
If the wall is enclosed, by other walls for instance, then the light would have nowhere to travel and the “see through vision” would fall through. Another solution that real world technology has to offer is to simply attach a camera to the other side of the wall and then project the image onto a screen in the room the observer is in. This again may be substandard resolution to the incredible and futuristic technology that Halo shows. One final possibility, comes from a wi-fi based technology developed over the past couple of years. Visible light is not the only form of electromagnetic light that passes through substances; lower frequency waves such as microwaves, can pass through objects that visible light does not, like walls. Experiments at both Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) show that wi-fi waves can be used to transmit the whereabouts of objects within enclosed walls. The MIT study showed that people’s movements can be tracked through walls, while the UCSB study how robots can use wi-fi to map the layout of a room from the