“It’s about the team that can bring the people, the technology and the processes together to learn the fastest — that’s the team that has the advantage.”
– Adm. John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations
In a dark room lit only by the singular glow of computer monitors, the future of naval operations is coming to life. The room is quiet; the only soundtrack is the low electronic hum from a slew of screens and computers.
That, and a greeting from a six-foot tall digital avatar of a Navy commander who greets you as you enter. He will even dance, Gangnam style, if you ask him.
Welcome to the BEMR Lab, located on the grounds of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) in San Diego, California. BEMR stands for Battlespace Exploitation of Mixed Reality.
The goal of the BEMR project is revolutionary, almost beautiful in its simplicity: BEMR aims to completely change the way Sailors and Marines do almost everything.
These men and women want to use new virtual technologies to help navigate a ship, fire weapons, conduct maintenance, assess data, train, assist operations and command and control — in other words — everything is on the table for the BEMR project to explore.
“The BEMR Lab is a constellation of technologies in augmented and virtual reality,” said Karl Van Orden, a senior technologist and one of the big brains behind BEMR. “It’s a place where we can explore how to exploit those technologies in our warfighting systems, in our training systems and other kinds of maintenance technologies [to shape the future force],” he said.
Or, in the words of retired Master Chief Jim Blesse at the Office of Naval Research (ONR): “As the world fills with people that have grown up with a game console always in their house, the demand for these types of technologies in daily life will grow from ‘nice to have’ to ‘can’t function without it.’”
BEMR Lab folks understand the ubiquitous video game culture that many young adults are immersed in. And rather than fight gaming’s near universal appeal, they want the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to embrace it.
A generational shift and application to the future force is already happening. Publicly released videos of the Laser Weapon System (LaWS), for instance, show Sailors operating the fleet’s Next “Big Thing” with what looks suspiciously like a video game controller.
That’s because it is a video game controller.
And the next next Big Thing at the strange intersection of video games and naval operations (not to mention medicine, architecture and countless other fields) is mixed reality, or MxR. It’s the term the BEMR Lab team calls the merging of virtual reality and augmented reality.
Virtual reality or virtual realities (VR), can be defined as immersive multimedia or computer-simulated reality, replicating an environment that simulates a physical presence in places in the real world or an imagined world, allowing the user to interact in that world. Virtual realities artificially create sensory experiences, which can include sight, hearing, touch and smell.
Augmented reality (AR) encompasses a live physical, real-world environment where elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. The technology functions to enhance the current perception of reality. For a simple example of augmented reality, think of the yellow lines on your television screen that are superimposed during televised football games.
In MxR, virtual and real worlds blend seamlessly. You can go back and forth between the two, where virtual and real objects and people interact — creating whole new worlds, and possibilities.
You can see yourself in a virtual space where virtual objects exist in your real-world line of sight.
In essence, MxR takes the best of both virtual and augmented reality, and merges them together.
Cool as the idea is, however, mixed reality isn’t even close to being fully developed yet. It’s been functional (as opposed to a concept) for less than a decade.
And no one can say they know precisely where the technology will lead.
So the BEMR Lab team, and its partners at SSC Pacific and ONR, are not only trying to imagine a destination — they’re drawing a whole new road map to a destination unknown.
Only one thing is certain: The future force is going to look different, train differently and function in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.
Phase Change: Revolution
Computer and pop-culture geeks who have followed the advances in mixed reality technology know that serious capability leaps have been made possible largely by breakthroughs in the gaming goggles known as Oculus Rift. To date, much of the BEMR Lab technology unashamedly leans on those goggles — because why reinvent the wheel, when all you really need to do is put the new wheel on your vehicle?
The Oculus Rift goggles are being used together with the latest in sensory gloves and other components to send users into virtual worlds with a realism — and, importantly, with an affordability — that has never been possible before.
Blesse and other members of the team are following these technology developments with great interest.
“I was looking for what technology area to focus on the rest of my life,” said Arne Odland, chief technologist at the BEMR Lab. In January of 2013, after months of searching, he heard about a new company, Oculus VR, that was creating a huge buzz with a prototype, an inexpensive VR display.
Odland was hooked. And now, he and his fellow BEMRs are incorporating some of those soon-to-be affordable and available technologies into new naval capabilities.
It’s already happening for the public. By the time this article is published, affordable, advanced VR displays will be in consumers’ hands. Sales of VR headsets are expected to soar in 2016. By 2020, consulting firm Digi-Capital projects that immersive virtual reality and augmented reality tech sales will reach $150 billion.
And even the Luddites among us agree that the Navy needs to be in the lead, rather than playing, and paying, to catch up. By unleashing cutting-edge technologists to explore the possibilities, the folks at ONR and SSC Pacific want to set the standard for advanced gear to best equip the future force for maximum impact and affordability.
“Within a few years this technology will be everywhere in the Navy and Marine Corps,” said David Rousseau, a recognized expert in virtual reality who works at SSC Pacific. “It will make your job easier, make it easier to win on the battlefield, and make deployments more agreeable because VR entertainment technology can deploy with you.”
Essentially, in both society at large and in the military, we are going through what author and scholar Douglas S. Robertson at the University of Colorado calls a Phase Change — that is, a moment of transition where a civilization or system experiences an epic change very quickly.
For Robertson, paradigm shifts in mankind’s progress have been triggered by the availability of breakthrough technologies — the telescope in astronomy or the microscope in biology are two examples.
Both led to not only new capabilities to see the previously un-seeable, but more important, led to fundamental new ways of perceiving and thinking about the universe, and a host of infinite possibilities for further research.
Quantum leaps in computer capability are another catalyst for phase change in our era. This advancing technology will change everything — how we see the world, how we function and how we imagine the future.
Some of the near-term changes for the Navy and Marine Corps could include:
• New platform and weapons concepts that will be tested and redeveloped quickly in an MxR framework, prior to any development. In short, we’ll “bend electrons” first, rather than having to “bend (fix) steel” later. This will have dramatic impact on efficient ship design. For instance, a Sailor can literally walk through a proposed design and see where there might be flaws — before the first weld is laid.
Adjustments can be made early and often to save millions of dollars on the final product.
• Training will be done much more efficiently in virtual environments, adding limitless scenario options to everything from operational planning to repair work. No Sailor or Marine will need to get on a plane to cross the country to be at a specific training site, or wait for a weapon or platform to be available and in perfect working order. Need your Marine squad to be familiar with a village in Iraq? With MxR, they can walk through the streets of the village, have data displayed, and perform small unit combat tactical training participating from multiple locations.
And they’ll feel like they’re really there.
At the BEMR Lab, one of the cool simulation programs lets you put on high-resolution virtual reality goggles and experience what it is like to be on a ship’s bridge — you walk around, see the controls, sensors, navigation plots, and are immersed in the shipboard environment.
You even feel dizzy “looking down” from the highest points on a ship’s mast — or what in prior eras was called the crow’s nest.
For the wrench turners and diagnostic machinist crowd, there’s a repair demo where a user can virtually fix a part using MxR capabilities, including special glasses. By the time he or she sees the real thing on a ship or helo, they’ll have already fixed that part multiple times leading to a level of expertise that once only years of experience could deliver.
• Command and control could likewise be dramatically improved for greater situational awareness. Users of the technology will see simultaneous tabular data on operational readiness and control swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned surface craft and also see what they see — the warfighting advantage and savings are potentially significant.
“There might come a time where we can see the track of an opposing vessel in our augmented navigation display,” Blesse said. “We might even have the capability to have a 3-D planning tool that can include all the assets and their crews and admirals — with all the people at their home commands.
“So an admiral and staff at the Pentagon, a DDG (destroyer) crew in the Pacific, a CVN team (aircraft carrier strike group) in the South Pacific, and an air wing at Pearl Harbor can all collaborate on a plan in real time,” he said.
The Background Story: Patience, Money, Vision
For the Navy, VR, AR and MxR includes a history of long-term science and technology vision, investment, patience and partnership.
The SwampWorks team at ONR has been the primary sponsor for the lab. SwampWorks explores innovative, high-risk disruptive technologies and concepts. Like most of the folks at ONR, their daily task is to imagine the undoable, to push the art of the impossible, by supporting science and technology research seed efforts that might not bloom for years, or even decades.
And they know good intentions are great, but great accomplishments usually cost money and require foresight.
“ONR’s mission is to fund in fundamental science, applied science and advanced science and technology — to take the science that we’re working on in the academic environment and bring it forward to the warfighter,” explained Dr. Lawrence Schuette, ONR’s director of research.
But the primary driver has to be long-term vision.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson gave such long-term S&T perspectives a top-level boost recently. Speaking on a panel titled “Harnessing Innovation for Defense” at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Nov. 7, Richardson said:
“Experimentation and failure is appropriate early on in the development process. That environment needs to be a little more agile and perhaps a little bit riskier — going through that, we actually gain confidence and field a much better tested product … So failure at the proper point is key to getting to a higher level of confidence faster.”
So part of the job for the folks at ONR is to look at a teenager playing the latest iteration of “Call of Duty,” or see a prototype of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and not be afraid to say: “What if…”
As Moore’s Law suggests, computer processing capabilities have been doubling, at least, every two years. And industry and military technologists looking at both augmented and virtual reality in the early 2000s knew that meant faster, cheaper capability for programmers to explore.
That led to the new commercialization of technology, and uber powerful, inexpensive hardware and software capable of exploring virtual reality in ways that hadn’t been possible even a year before.
And that led to Project BlueShark at ONR.
BlueShark, developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies with ONR sponsorship, was the beginning of much of the virtual reality work that is today the foundation of the BEMR Lab.
The idea, Blesse said, was to see the future of virtual reality, bring it to the present and apply new VR capabilities to naval training, operations, maintenance and any other aspect of Navy and Marine Corps life.
BlueShark was intended as a one-stop shop for the present and the future.
“BlueShark started out as an exploration into what technologies and systems digital natives should expect to see when they hit the workforce,” Blesse explained.
As Schuette at ONR put it: “BEMR is one of those advanced science and technology efforts that harvests the work we’ve done previously — to bring it forward to the warfighter to show them what the future could be.”
BlueShark quickly captured people’s imaginations, both inside and outside of the Navy. Multiple articles came out about Project BlueShark. It was sexy. The geeks at SwampWorks were suddenly a combination of Kirk and Spock, or in modern parlance, Penny and Sheldon.
The SwampWorks team believed that, perhaps very soon, prototyping a concept in MxR would be a requirement prior to building a new platform or weapon.
They believed that the virtual prototype controls would become actual, real system controls.
And they believed that MxR could one day touch every project and program of record in the Navy and Marine Corps.
BEMR software lead Joshua Li — a young engineer at SSC Pacific — doesn’t mince words about the value of ONR’s early Shark attack.
“ONR has played a big role for us,” he said. “A lot of the technology we have in this room was inherited from previous ONR projects. BlueShark is obviously created from ONR funding, and we are continuing that research from the BlueShark demo.”
With the encouragement of top leadership at ONR, including Schuette and Dr. Thomas Killion, who heads the command’s Technology directorate, Blesse met with Heidi Buck at SSC Pacific.
Their shared vision? Mixed reality will play a key role in the future force.
And they weren’t alone. At the same time Buck was ginning up the BEMR Lab, then Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert was watching the technology field. And at the 2015 Sea-Air-Space Expo, he issued a series of statements as if designed to encourage and support them:
“Virtual reality can benefit Sailors in every rating.”
“It’s time to bring simulators and virtual reality training to the whole fleet.”
“The fidelity of virtual reality today is such that our folks can use touch screens to immerse in anything, from starting a diesel engine to launching a torpedo to working on an aircraft.”
There was more — Navy and Marine Corps leaders were listening. To date, 1,500 visitors, including senior officers, have visited the BEMR Lab to see what’s happening now in MxR, and what might come next.
Achieving the Future
The BEMR Lab has proved, its advocates say, not only the potential but the actual reality of using various forms of alternate realities. Now comes the real challenge, and it could prove far more difficult than perfecting new technological capabilities.
BEMR technology needs to go from a fascinating concept to Big Navy and acquisition dollars. Experts in the defense world call it “bridging the acquisition valley of death” — that is, getting over the hurdles of regulations and paperwork, and getting a sponsor to bring it to the fleet.
That, Blesse said, is where the next MxR battle will take place.
“The S&T investment in synthetic environments has produced many interesting concepts and potential CONOPS,” he explained. “Additionally this S&T investment line has brought about interest from industry and academia alike to advance the technology sector.
“Further warfare center development is necessary, as well as more S&T work, to bring about innovative technologies based off the work completed so far.”
In short, the future will be decided now. Potentially, remarkable advances in training, warfighter performance and efficiency, and even command and control capabilities, using mixed reality are within sight.
Whether those advances will become woven into the future force is now a question of time and funding.
Adm. Richardson in his Reagan Forum appearance recognized the need for speed in helping innovative naval programs reach the fleet.
“The first step is getting visibility on this fleet-level innovation,” Adm. Richardson said. “I’m happy to use whatever top-down pressure I can to inject that into the acquisition system.”
Since the inception of ONR in 1946, investments in far-reaching concepts have brought about cutting-edge technologies and capabilities that have become part of our everyday lives. Radar research is now found in our cars to keep us from colliding; time-keeping research has given us GPS in cellular phones; optical research has developed what we can now describe as 4K television; and the list goes on.
In like manner, investments in MxR will be impactful. And critical Navy S&T funding helped bring it to center stage.
View the BEMR video.