Geek Gestalt

A look across the so-called Navy Command Center of the Future, a prototype facility being built at the SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific in San Diego and which is intended to show senior decision makers in the Navy and other military services, what is possible when it comes to actionable working environments.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

SAN DIEGO--I have seen the future of military command centers, and it is small rooms with glass walls and video screens with built-in artificial intelligence.

That's probably a gross oversimplification, but those are certainly some of the elements on display at the Navy's Command Center of the Future, a prototype project currently under way at the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center Pacific here.

For those not familiar with SPAWAR, it is a Navy laboratory tasked with "creating an unfair advantage for our war fighters," according to Jim Fallin, the facility's director of communications, that designs "systems, infrastructure, sensors and the means needed to create a fully netted combat force that operates and interlaces all the domains of warfare, from seabed to space."

With clients and partners that include the U.S. Army, Marines, and Air Force, as well as many universities and other institutions, SPAWAR is a growing--and hiring--research institution that aims to give America's military services "the ability to disrupt any adversary's ability to conduct warfare."

Photos: Looking in on the Navy's Command Center of the Future

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And given that these are the guys recently tasked with reworking the White House's famous Situation Room, they also seem like the right ones to take the traditional military command center--with huge rooms, row after row after row of desks with computers and huge video screens--and flip such environments on their head. In other words, SPAWAR has nothing short of a major assignment on its hands: to build the kind of center that will best serve the soldiers and decision makers of the future, all while minimizing the physical space necessary for such rooms and maximizing the use of technology.

Showcasing the technology of the future
The Command Center of the Future (CCoF), which has had a budget so far of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, first opened its doors just four months ago and is clearly not yet finished. But given that it's a prototype of the kinds of military action centers that are likely to be in use five or ten years down the line, it's probably best that the SPAWAR folks not rush to finish their work.

Upon entering what turns out to be a pretty small room deep inside a nondescript SPAWAR office building, visitors are greeted initially by a wall of military insignia and then by a dimly-lit, quiet, room with gleaming glass walls and banks of video screens installed behind the glass.

According to my host, SPAWAR research engineer Jeff Clarkson, who is leading the project, the CCoF has as one of its main purposes the highlighting and showcasing of the technologies of the future.

Notwithstanding the visit of a CNET News reporter, the typical visitor since the doors to the CCoF opened four months ago have included VIPs like Navy admirals, the secretary of the Navy, the chief of Naval Operations, and others eager to see the kinds of facilities likely to be featured on warships and in Department of Defense facilities a few years from now.

And the idea behind this room--which is far from operational--is to convey, in its small space, what a future command center may well look like, Clarkson said.

One clear goal of the CCoF is to show how military decision makers no longer need to be together in a single room in order to work on actionable intelligence, make strategic decisions, or communicate with subordinate personnel around the world. Rather, the room is designed to bring together those who need to be involved in discussions surrounding specific military engagements, regardless of whether they're local. Indeed, the room's very mission statement is to make it possible to rely on video teleconferencing and artificial intelligence in such meetings.

And while the CCoF is still in its early stages--its many video screens are still tuned to cable news channels rather than remote Navy locations--Clarkson and his team are hopeful that they will soon move to the next stage and build into the room the technologies that will showcase just how the people who will use it will interact with the tools of the future.

For example, while the video screens today are nothing more than TVs with shiny glass covers, they will soon feature multitouch overlays that will mean many of the glass surfaces will allow decision makers to manipulate data and other information simply by running their fingers over the glass, much as users of iPhones do today.

Similarly, while it's still in a presentation stage, the CCoF will be used for things like mocking up Flash representations of the control system of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) so that decision makers can see how much control they have over such assets from far across the world.

'The art of the possible'
Just after entering the room, visitors notice an area that is separated from the main space by its own set of glass walls. In normal circumstances, this is where to place junior staff members in front of a couple of computers.

But the idea behind this sub-room is to give decision makers a private, secure, place to go for classified discussions. And while it might initially be counter-intuitive to have such discussions in what at first appears much like a fish tank, Clarkson explained that in fact, that room is designed with glass that can automatically turn dark, as well as sound-proofing that can make it entirely secure.

And the point of this, Clarkson continued, is to make it possible for such senior officials to be able to huddle together for highly sensitive discussions without having to leave the command center, saving a great deal of time for everyone involved.

To be sure, this room inside this San Diego building is by no means a final product. In fact, even when future command centers are being constructed, they will likely have an infinite number of sizes and configurations that will match their surroundings: smaller rooms on Navy ships and larger ones inside Department of Defense buildings, Clarkson said.

But for now, as military VIPs show up to see the prototype, the idea is really to give them a sense of "the art of the possible," as Fallin put it.

Changing mission needs
Clarkson said that one of the major focuses of the CCoF is to prove that such an environment can be flexible and adaptable to "changing mission needs."

That means that the rooms need to be easily reconfigurable, something that is clear in how it was set up during my visit. On one side of the room, a group of eight chairs was set up as a place for seating junior staff while senior officials put their heads together at the main round-table.

But that configuration was just one way for the room to be presented, Clarkson said. And anyway, many of those who would take place in the kinds of discussions that would be centered in the room would be at remote locations, communicating via teleconference.

Yet Clarkson said even such virtual communication would be aided by the latest technologies. One such advance would be an implementation of artificial intelligence that would display, on the appropriate screens on the glass walls, documents being talked about by those on the screens.

In other words, Clarkson said, the CCoF would have AI meant to discern what is being talked about during a teleconference and to know how to source up whatever documents are needed as they're needed.

At the same time, the technology could also keep track of those on-screen and show, for the benefit of those in the room, little heads-up displays (HUDs) that identify each on-screen speaker.

And while the command centers of the future may be needed by senior officials to set strategy during specific action, they are also likely to be manned 24/7 by junior officials making sure that proper communications with supporting organizations are always under way.

Ultimately, Clarkson said, the state-of-the-art in command center workflow theory is built around the idea of flow. He explained that research has shown that decision makers think better if they can move around while they talk and that's why the CCoF here has been designed to allow such senior officials to walk and talk and never lose sight of those they're communicating with. In the past, by comparison, the experience has been much more sedentary, with officials coming in and sitting down at a table the entire time.

"We want to create a sense of guests and hosts being able to walk (around) together and still be discussing," said Clarkson. "They still have security and still have information, and they can look up something if (they) need it."

And while the command center of the past--like, say, the alternate command center of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)--has traditionally been a basketball court-size space with endless rows of desks, Clarkson said he hopes that the work being done on the CCoF will demonstrate that in the wars of the future, what's really needed is technology to bring dispersed people together so that they can discuss the important topics of the day, no matter where they are.

"We're just trying to show what's possible," Clarkson said, "what's coming down the pipeline, and what we envision the future to be."

The Institute for the Future has released its initial findings from its alternate-reality game, Superstruct.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

Last year, the Institute for the Future created an alternate-reality game, Superstruct, designed to crowdsource scenarios to try to save humanity from fictional "superthreats" discovered in 2019 that are thought to mean the end of humanity by 2042.

Now, the IFTF has issued its first findings from the 1,000-plus stories, 500-plus discussions, and 500-plus "superstructures" created by the worldwide community of the game's players, and while there's some reason for hope, there's also a lot to be pessimistic about.

In a report issued Wednesday evening, Superstruct's program director, Kathi Vian, lead scenario designer, Jamais Cascio, and lead game designer, Jane McGonigal, that they had crunched the community's collective submissions and settled on three main scenarios.

First, "The Long crisis," which "plots a path of slow response, resistance to change, and attempts to maintain current power relationships."

Second, "Emergence," which "follows a course of rapid adaptation from the bottom up, without much unifying direction."

And finally, "The great transition," which "envisions a world remade by technology, a challenge to the planetary dominance of humans as a species."

"All these scenarios are troubling," the report concluded. "They challenge us to ask hard questions about the choices we're making today and are likely to make tomorrow. They disabuse us of utopianism. But perhaps they also inspire us to think beyond our current tracks, to search for the breakthrough ideas that will provide a fourth, fifth, or tenth scenario."

"The Long Crisis" posits a timeline starting in 2010 and ending in 2060 that spells out a series of grim climate changes, as well as a general deterioration of geopolitical stability and the human condition.

Yet, the report also has some hopeful conclusions about general human behavior.

"Superstructing means reinventing our tools and processes, our organizational structures, and even our concepts of cooperation and collaboration," the report's summary reads. "So how do we know when we're on the right track? How do we know when we've gone beyond the best practices of contemporary organizations to superstruct our projects?"

The conclusions are varied, but the IFTF summed them up in five pithy, bullet-pointed sections that are expanded upon in the report's summary. Briefly, though, the report's authors wrote:

"You'll know you're superstructing when you've achieved: More and different participation."

"You'll know you're superstructing when you begin to implement what once were: Nearly inconceivable possibilities."

"You'll know you're superstructing when you're inventing and testing: Smaller and bigger practices."

"You'll know you're superstructing when you are creating: Stranger and more shareable products."

"You'll know you're superstructing when you are designing and participating in: New and world-changing processes."

There's much more about the results of the months of data-crunching in the report itself, which is easily found online. All told, though, I suppose the findings shouldn't be all that surprising. We can all see the direction the world is heading and the urgent necessity for massive intervention. Yet any such intervention is made difficult by the political, military and physical challenges involved in implementing them.

Still, while purely fictional, the point of Superstruct, and the value in the findings, is that we should now have a little bit better sense of what's coming, and perhaps, how to stave off the things we don't want.

The Institute for the Future's new game, 'Superstruct,' posits that humanity may be extinct by 2042 and that only stories submitted by players can mitigate the dangers of five so-called superthreats.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

If you knew the human race was facing imminent extinction, what would you do?

For the folks at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, creating a fictional scenario in which five "superthreats" have coalesced in 2019 to augur the end of the human race by 2042 became the basis for a new alternate-reality game (ARG) in which players the world over have been weighing in with ideas for staving off disaster.

The game the IFTF created, known as Superstruct, launched October 6, and is the first of what could be many so-called massively multiplayer forecasting games. The idea behind Superstruct and others that could follow it is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to come up with solutions to complicated problems and do so in a fun, challenging, and entertaining way that encourages people's participation.

The five superthreats include "quarantine," which involves "declining health and pandemic disease," "ravenous," which deals with the world's collapsing food system, "power struggle," which revolves around declining energy and the fight over remaining energy resources, "outlaw planet," which focuses on the erosion of civil rights and "generation exile," which looks at the worldwide "diaspora of diasporas," or a worldwide refugee epidemic.

And it may be working. Already, the game--which ends November 17--has more than 5,000 players from across the globe who have contributed hundreds of ideas, in the form of stories, intended to mitigate the coming faux-disaster.

As of Monday, those user-submitted ideas have already been deemed strong enough that the Superstruct site now says that the end of the human race has been pushed back at least six years, to 2048.

To be sure, Superstruct is nothing more than scenario planning in the guise of a game, and despite the many, many drastic problems Earth faces these days, it is very unlikely that the human race is actually down to its last 40 years.

But for many participants in the game, being involved has satisfied an itch to make some sort of difference in the world.

"It appears that people are extremely motivated by the challenge of fixing the future," said Jane McGonigal, the lead designer on Superstruct. "People are unsettled right now, with the economy (and other crises and) that makes us hungry for the opportunity to contribute."

McGonigal, who previously helped design the famous ARG, I Love Bees, A World without Oil, and more recently led the design on the Olympic-themed ARG, The Lost Ring, said that the early planning of Superstruct involved asking participants to submit stories of dinner conversations they might have in 2019.

She said that very quickly, more than 1,000 people came forward with such stories, something that caught her, and her fellow Superstruct lead organizers, forecast director Kathi Vian and scenario director Jamais Cascio, off guard.

"That signaled to us that people will take this very, very seriously," McGonigal said. "That was the cue to me that this was going to be big and was going to tap into this unmet hunger for contributing."

Among her favorite dinner stories, McGonigal said, was one that a married man from New Zealand who currently has no children, but hopes to one day, came up with about what he would say to his kids about the fact that they could be the last generation of the human race.

"It was really thoughtful, not (like from a) B-movie," McGonigal said. "It was serious, and reflects what people are thinking about today."

The five superthreats confronting humanity include global food shortages, massive movements of refugees and worldwide battles over energy.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

And while Superstruct is clearly fiction, McGonigal and her colleagues at the Institute for the Future see it as imperative that scenarios like the ones raised in the game get talked about now.

"The world will almost certainly be a worse place for the next generation," she said. "If we don't act now, we're going to have a lot of explaining" to do.

Because Superstruct takes place across a wide range of media--including wikis, blogs, YouTube, forums, and others, some feel that it can help players with their own professional development even as they participate in bettering the understanding of how to deal with the problems of the future.

"I think one of the coolest parts of the game is how it takes advantage of players' existing participatory media literacy and pushes them to develop new ones," said Dale Larson, a mobile and social media strategist. "The transfer from game to real world is not only...solving the future problems but (also fostering) real world collaboration from both social and technical perspectives that lead to job skills and organizational skills."

As the game progresses, a series of "game masters" are taking some of the stories submitted by players and incorporating them into the larger Superstruct scenario.

That's why the date of humanity's extinction has already moved from its original 2042 to the current 2048--because of the value of the many user-created submissions.

Indeed, one of the goals of the game seems to be to turn the superthreats on their head and use the submissions made by player in each of the five categories to come up with solutions to the problems. And that's why each superthreat is subtitled, for example, "inventing the future of food," or "inventing the future of security."

Each week, a new update is posted for each superthreat, bringing the scenario current according to the game masters' incorporation of submissions.

So, for example, this week's assessment of the food crisis includes the following: "There are big ideas afoot to confront the Ravenous Superthreat head-on, like irrigating the Australian desert with solar-desalinated ocean water. Alongside this are more subtle ones oriented to ecological stability; this week, for instance, has seen no fewer than three Superstructs proposed to address the challenge of maintaining bee populations. As solutions continue to arise, however, so do the challenges. We're getting reports of continued battles on the home front for personal food security."

Of course, the stories that are used to create these ongoing scenarios are available for public viewing as well. And the best are given awards based on creativity and other attributes.

One example came from a player called Tiny Tegan, who posited a scene from Amsterdam, where supermarkets have closed down due to a lack of stocked shelves--and government regulations against imported food. The fictional Amsterdam resident reported that he (or she) walked past a closed market, only to see people milling around inside. Climbing through a shattered door to see what was going on, the resident found a number of "ragged farmers" trading various meats, cheeses, bread and so on.

"I purchased (an apple) for a resaonable fee and asked (the farmer) where she had come from," Tiny Tegan wrote. "She explained that these farmers were part of a virtual collective, sharing agricultural tips and political news across Netherland's rural expanses--and that the urban food shortage has inspired them to start a co-op in the city. They had arrived that morning and were planning to open their doors the next day. Needless to say, I was ecstatic and asked what I could do to help. She said, 'Spread the word.'"

Hundreds of similar stories exist for each of the five superthreats.

And that's precisely the point.

"It's exciting stuff," said Ron Meiners, the director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group. "It creates a new forum for people to collaboratively address issues and problems we all face. The technology offers new opportunities for people to work together, but we are just learning the roles we can have together. Superstruct is a very creative way for people to effectively discuss different Issues, and ideally, meaningful solutions...We need to evolve new social structures to collaborate and work together."

As the game has moved forward and players have impressed the game masters with their submissions, the human race has gotten a little more time on its clock.

McGonigal acknowledged that she and her fellow planners did consider letting the clock run in reverse, meaning that humans could die off before 2042.

Thankfully, though, it will only be possible to make our race live longer, at least under the rules of Superstruct.

"We decided that just by throwing your lot in and putting attention on problems," McGonigal said, "that will only do good, so we've decided that there's very little players can do to hurt" mankind's future.

The Institute for the Future is launching a series of what it calls 'massively multiplayer forecasting games' designed to help researchers come up with solutions to long-term global problems. The first game, Superstruct, will launch October 6.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line.