My colleague Colin Clark and I stumbled across a cool technology Global Situational Awareness at the Navy League conference. Offered by DRS Technologies, its a geospatial information system that also allows sharing of data from almost any source UAV videos, schematics, photos, SAR, IR etc. on a pretty simple touchscreen. The imported data can be overlaid on the geospatial data and used for mission planning and a host of other applications.
As software engineer Michael Bridges shows, you can call up a region and slap on it overlay after overlay, showing you topography, elevation, streets and highways. If you dont like a birds eye view, hell flip the image on its side, any side.
Want to see what a Predator is watching, or perhaps cameras mounted on a guard post or tower? A tap of the menu along the side of the screen and the streaming video appears on the map screen. Another menu tap and Bridges can use a finger to plot a pathway reflecting the movements of opposing forces. A commander using the Integrated Tactical Command and Control Console could send all, or just part, of the images before him to the computer screens of other commanders.
The consoles hardware has been under development for about three years, the software about one, Hodges said. Currently, the system can handle about 10 applications at the same time, but the company already is working on an even more muscular system that could handle an infinite number of applications.
The base is comprised of U.S. Geological Survey maps, he said, but a commander with his own data, collected by his own people and sources, would be able to load it into the system and work with it on the oversized map.
Bridges said the console may get a tryout at this years Trident Warrior exercise, which the Naval Network Warfare Command conducts to test the Navys newest communication technologies.
The touch screen allows fast and simple manipulation of the data. For the rest, the video demonstrates it better than we can describe it. Anderson Cooper and CNN eat your hearts out.
Sounds like a pretty simple combination of a MS surface style touch screen interface (think giant iphone) and google earth. Honestly it sounds like someone spent a lot of time re-inventing the wheel here. Concept it good for commanders though, I mean have you ever used google earth?
maybe google Earth on steroids… Just wait, they are working on the airborne screen.
All good and well till we have a tech enemy who can then use our own data against us.
FWIW, neither Philip Dick, nor the screen writers who adapted his story for the silver screen, ever intended to take a stand against cool user interfaces for computers, despite the generally anti-utopian tone of Minority Report.
The again, the newly released book “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life,” by Winifred Gallagher, makes a compelling case that multi-tasking is bad. DRS Technologies may believe that the holy grail is a “system that could handle an infinite number of applications.” But, I find it hard to imagine of more dreadful example of counterproductive feature bloat.
Another brilliant technological answer in search of a question.
One thing our military needs for sure is more effective micromanagement tools. Providing the TOC with a sexy screen flooding out more information than any mind could possibly process is guaranteed to give the BDE CDR the false confidence that makes micromanagement inevitable. Nothing quite like senior leaders with live-feed super awareness who know nothing about everything and therefore refuse to trust the scout with eyes on.
Can I get a “hooah” if you’ve been there?
I’d like to see the military take 1 brigade and equip them with all these toys and have them fight a Red Flag exercise against another brigade that is stripped of all this nonsense, but that can have it’s pick of choice tactical gear and increase training.
They can run the exercise multiple times in multiple environments and see how it shakes out.
My money is on the leaner, meaner brigade wiping the floor with the toy brigade.
I WANT 10!