The Navy's Command Center of the Future takes shape

[ Music ] ^M00:00:03 >> I'm Jeff Clarkson, a research engineer at [inaudible] Research Center Pacific. Welcome to the command center of the future. I'm just going to walk you around and tell you a little bit about some of our functions. This is basically the lobby. As you enter the command center, our intention is to give you a quick update on the, the functions that are happening. And so we have our walls we turn into screens. In the future we'd have a list of the, the critical information requirements that the center is working on. And as we move through the center, these screens are going to support that presentation of information, help be aware of what's going on. Then as I enter the, the actual command center, I could be greeted by the watch officer who has the big picture of what's going on. We might have other teams working on different problems. Some might be here on the north wall and some might be here on the south wall, each working on a particular problem that the center is handling. And the watch officer is in charge of, of collecting and managing all that information and presenting it to me. Then I move into the briefing space. This is where I'd have, if I were the commander, I'd have my senior staff and we would sit, sit down. And we've already gotten a sense of what the problems are and who's working on the status. But now we get together and we try and solve those problems and we try and create plans, see if those plans can be implemented and, and what the effects of those plans are. And we have all the supporting visuals to help us understand the, you know what we need to know to make those decisions. And we believe in the future there might be a lot of augmented artificial intelligence, machine learning to help us process all the information that will be available and make it into a way that we can, we can process that as humans. This space also has a dual function. It, it's supposed to show what a command center of the future could look like but it is also our command briefing room. So we have a lot of VIPs come into the room and we need, you know space for people to sit and understand what we do here at the command. But it gives that impression that you're in a command center on a ship or in the Pentagon or in a command center in the Pacific. One of the concepts that we think is going to be big is the sense of you know a distributed command center. So, we're going to be using a lot of HD high quality VTCs, bringing remote sites together. They'll be a part of the staff, a part of the command center, but they'll just be in a virtual location. And so they might be up on one of these screens, you know 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's just a window into that cell that's a part of this, this command center. What we did was, one of the things that happens in a command center is you, you have to operate at different security levels. And pieces of information come out that might be at a higher security level. So in the future what we would do is we would make the glass opaque with a, with technology. So for 10 minutes we would make the glass opaque and we put acoustic dampeners and then we go into this smaller conference room. Conduct the higher level security briefing and then when we conclude, we can walk out and now we can still be a part of the, the action on the command center floor. >> So the people don't actually have to leave. >> They don't have to leave the room and go to another building. It's a part of the command center. And then when we're not at a different security level, we could turn this into a war room or a, a work space to handle a specific problem that you know that needs more attention, that's not something that can be handled on the watch floor. We could have a smaller team work inside the command center. We could also set up a, you know a dedicated VTC, you know all screens can handle video teleconferencing. ^M00:04:23 [ Music ]