Ultra high-tech armour for weapon sparring

[Tony Wolf]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M68WtF88w6A

The "Unified Weapons Master" system is a new brand of high-tech armor, especially designed for weapon sparring. As well as offering good protection and mobility, UWM has built-in force sensors that instantly transmit impact data to an external computer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lizWjAo_8w

The Aussie developers plan to road-test the system by setting up a weapons-based MMA league, open to all styles. IMO this has a lot of potential for all kinds of weapons competition formats (kendo, longsword fencing, Filipino and European stick fighting styles, etc.), not to mention true weapons-based MMA. If it all works as advertised, it would solve a lot of problems re. judging that type of contest.

The fact that the fighters look like a cross between Robocop and Iron Man is just a bonus, though it might make UWM a hard sell for MA traditionalists.

[MEversbergII]

It could be just the lighting in the vid, but it doesn't look like those guys can move their heads much.

M.

[admin]

Very interesting, though perhaps ironically it doesn't look protective enough for what we do. The suits also look quite clumsy. Interesting start though!

[MEversbergII]

I guess I am a fan of the idea of mixed weapon arts, though we all know where that'll go. So far there's a lot of disappointing videos of it up on Youtube (keep having flash backs to this rapier vs longsword one that was particularly bad) and there's some problems about scoring that we've discussed here in the past. I'm wondering if something like this could change the meta-game up, though.

M>