We can't wait to check out the military's new DARPA-funded reenactment of the insanely successful James Cameron movie Avatar. As Wired's Katie Drummond points out, the project promises to be just like the mega-hit 2009 movie, but will only cost $7 million and will star American soldiers instead of Sam Worthington.

This life-imitates-Hollywood project was announced as part of the Pentagon's $2.8 billion budget for 2013, which explains it as follows: "the Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate." It's unclear if this means the avatars will actually do fighting, though the report lists the robots duties as, "room clearing, sentry control [and] combat casualty recovery." But why not go ahead and strap some lasers on their arms? They can just borrow this $38 million death cannon from the Army.

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Adam Clark Estes