Gadgetory

with an aim to bring gladiatorial combat to the modern age unified weapons master is a high-tech sport based around ancient combat we spoke to CEO David piston unified weapons master or UWM started out as a crazy idea about five years ago and since then it's evolved from being completely insane to highly ambitious and now totally achievable the genesis of the idea came from my business partner training throughout Asia and seen incredible weapons based martial artists that no one had ever heard of and the reason for that is there's no format or forum where those guys can compete so he thought wouldn't it be great if there was a way to showcase the skills of these guys and use technology to bring that to the fore and that's what we've done the construction of the armor is quite a complex process and it's been interesting because we've had to solve a number of technical challenges in building the armor you know armor has been around for thousands of years but no one has previously had to incorporate sensors in the armor that measure the force and location of strikes to the armor and all of the other electronics that we include in it so in terms of how the materials are constructed this is like a sandwich of different materials there's a high impact layer which prevents penetration that's typically a carbon fiber type layer and then there are polycarbonate layers and what are called elastomeric foams which are high impact absorbing phones so they reduce the shock and impact of combat with weapons and sandwiched in between those we have these sensors that measure all of the forces that are being applied to the armor in real time the sensors do report back to a scoring system so we have built a system with medical data underpinning in it that data includes fracture profile data and blunt trauma data and we know objectively how much force the body can withstand before it breaks or before critical damages incurred and so what those sensors are doing is measuring all of the forces that are being applied to the armor but the scoring system interprets that as if the competitor was not wearing armor knows how much damage would have occurred to that competitor there is a feedback process built into the armor we have a lighting system that we're building into the suits which will visually display the damage that's been incurred to different parts of the body in real time there's also audio feedback to the competitor that tells them how much damage has been sustained and then finally we have a referee who will be part of the competitions and that referee has feedback going to him and when someone has lost a virtual life or become incapacitated that ref will step in and give them effectively a standing 8-count and if they have lives left because it's a bit like a video again we give them multiple lives otherwise it can be over quite quickly then they will be allowed to fight on and that actually prolongs the entertainment experience for the audience historically there's 96 different weapons based martial arts that are practiced all around the world and those arts have evolved over hundreds and even thousands of years but there's really nowhere that you can see those arts practiced and the people that do practice it have nowhere where they can compete to test how far they've gone so what we've done is create the opportunity for a competition where people from all around the world you know Japanese samurai masters Chinese Shaolin staff masters Indian kalari PI art masters incredible weapons based experts to come together in a single global competition and compete to find out who is the world's best weapons master that's why it's unified weapons master you