High tech armour could reinvent Mixed Martial Arts by allowing weapons

High tech armour could reinvent Mixed Martial Arts by allowing weapons

ONE of sport’s most controversial categories, Mixed Martial Arts, could get an entirely new outlook if a competition based on Australian technology takes off.

UWM — Unified Weapons Master — plans to run competitions later this year between world-calibre martial artists, with a difference. That difference would be that unlike current MMA bouts, weapon use would be encouraged, because combatants would be clad in high tech armour designed not only to protect but also to register the real force behind each strike.

A team of researchers at Sydney firm Chiron Global, including a former armour developer on the Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit films have spent the past four years developing the armour system, which is designed to be flexible enough to fight in while retaining both protective and real-time reporting functions.

The Iron Man-like armour, due to be launched next week, uses in-built sensors to both calculate and display the damage a weapon or limb strike would have done. The results are generated in real-time, and could be supplemented with 3D visuals to give a public view of the expected damage on a human body from each blow.

“UWM’s vision is to create a large-scale sport and entertainment experience where martial artists can compete against each other with real weapons, with an objective measure of who would have won in a real combat situation” UWM CEO David Pysden said.