Have you ever dreamed of having eyes in the back of your head?

Yeah, we haven’t either, but FlyVIZ, designed by French engineers, lets you experience a real-time 360° vision of your surroundings. It combines a panoramic image acquisition system (positioned on top of the your head) with a head-mounted display (HMD) and a laptop for transforming the fly-eye images in real time into something humans can see.

“We foresee potential applications in different fields where augmented human capacity (an extended field-of-view) could benefit, such as surveillance, security, or entertainment,” say the inventors.

“In safety and security applications, soldiers, policemen or firemen could benefit from omnidirectional vision to avoid potential dangers or locate targets more rapidly. In less critical situations, some surveillance applications with a high visual workload, in all directions of space for instance, could also be concerned, such as for traffic regulation.

“Considering the novel perceptual experience proposed, FlyViz could also be transformed into entertaining applications and devices, as well as experimental materials for new perception and neuroscience studies.”

Augmented-reality apps could also enhance this gadget, the engineers suggest.

Just don’t wear this in the McDonald’s at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees in Paris.