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Looking to the Future - Plan Jericho Air Force's Plan Jericho Disruptive Innovation team is taking mission control operations to the people with virtual reality. Despite the technological leaps since the space program of the 1950s, the data available for decision-making in control rooms has largely remained unchanged, and the decision-makers still rely on being in a specific location. Wing Commander Alex Gibbs, from the Jericho Disruptive Innovation team, said he felt sure there was a smarter way of working. “Instead of sending our people to concrete bunkers around the country, what if we were able to provide them with the information, they need to make quick, informed decisions, wherever they may be?” Wing Commander Gibbs said. It was this question that led himi and a team of experts to develop a 22
powerful virtual operations room using Microsoft's HoloLens 2 headset – providing an augmented reality view of the world. “We can project a hologram of the battlespace in front of the user,” Wing Commander Gibbs said. “Users can quickly understand where all the various pieces are – for example aircraft, drones, elements on the ground – and they can make decisions at what we call ‘the speed of relevance’.” HoloLens supports multiple levels of data and brings together different live feeds and internal applications, presenting them to the user in a personalised, clever and simple way. The team currently uses data from sensors, 3D terrain images and air-space boundaries to allow the HoloLens user to see everything on
the ground, in the air, and in space. But there are other possibilities. “The data that we can plug into HoloLens is really endless,” Wing Commander Gibbs said. “It is a very very, flexible system.” The team is using Microsoft’s Azure cloud-based infrastructure to support sensors, data and users anywhere in the world. Flexibility is the key benefit to this innovation. “The most important thing is that it can be used anywhere. The user can be in an aircraft, in a tent, or on a ship,” Wing Commander Gibbs said. The applications for the system are also limitless and it has a further benefit: substantial cost savings. Inn addition to saving money spent on the real estate, computers, monitors, and pipes needed for a