A Meeting of Minds: Enhancing Industry Collaboration With Mixed Reality
The lessons I learned 25 years ago in Norway with 45 Commando remain as fresh now as the weather was back then (often in the region of -20°C).
On the Cold Weather Warfare Course, the unit’s Mountain Leaders used to drill into us how every small detail in the Arctic was crucial both to our personal resilience and to the sustainability and operational effectiveness of the team. We learned how to recognise the insidious symptoms of hypothermia: how the body draws blood away from the periphery to preserve the core; how coordination and dexterity deteriorates; and how higher functions degrade.
When it comes to large, collaborative teams working on multi-year programmes of record, it seems to me that something analogous to hypothermia happens all too often. When times are challenging there’s a natural, often imperceptible tendency towards consolidation. The programme scope gets reduced. Requirements become mere targets. Innovative systems due to be supplied by specialist SMEs fall by the wayside. The commercial corpus is forced to focus resources on keeping the core operating.
This consolidation leads to more monolithic systems, more proprietary platforms and more closed standards. It’s not that industry is unwilling to collaborate, it’s that often it simply can’t afford to.
Peripheral technologies are having a central role in the changing character of warfare
Over the course of thirty years in the Royal Navy, I saw the effect that this commercial and technological consolidation has on front-line operations and how seemingly small innovations can have as big an impact on flexibility, resilience and lethality as large, complex platforms.
Today, we need only look to Ukraine to see how technologies that might initially seem peripheral – like drones – can quickly come to play a central role in changing the whole character of conflict.
My last four years in uniform at NATO ACT made it clear to me know crucial enabling technologies are going to be when it comes to turning concepts like the UK’s Integrated Operating Concept into reality. It’s precisely why I joined Kognitiv Spark: because I believe that technologies like Mixed reality (MR) are going to have a profound impact on how militaries operate, how wars are fought, and ultimately who wins.
Effective collaboration is impossible without effective communication
This issue of consolidation is, of course, hugely frustrating for the UK MoD and its allies, just as it is for suppliers. MoD is looking for maximum diversity in its supply chain – for capabilities that can be rapidly upgraded, for open standards, for modular architectures that promise flexibility and agility rather than rigidity. The theme runs right through from the Integrated Review Refresh and Defence Command Paper to the Digital, Data, AI and Industrial strategy papers. MoD needs better collaboration with – and crucially between – industry partners.
The key to enabling this is faster, more effective communication and collaboration across the entire military-industrial enterprise: between customers and suppliers, within suppliers, and between suppliers – a capability that mixed reality brings to the forefront.
Existing technologies can support new innovations that lower costs, enhance efficiency and enable collaboration
My colleague, Duncan McSporran, wrote recently about the impact that getting knowledge where it’s needed has on front-line operations. The same arguments, principles and benefits apply to commercial operations: getting the right information in the right format to the right people at the right time leads to lower costs, enhanced operational efficiency, greater sustainability, improved safety and even better talent retention.
Take, for example, a common marine-sector task like addressing issues of class on a ship. From design through build to operation, it’s a fundamentally human process involving a raft of procurement staff, safety management specialists, prime contractor representatives, designers, engineers, technicians and inspectors. In the past few years, particularly through Covid, we’ve learned that a range of classification issues can be resolved remotely. Far too often, however, inspectors are still travelling up and down the country to meet ships on their sailing schedules. The costs in time, money, fuel, operational effectiveness and human capacity soon add up.
The costs add up even faster when, to take another example, an OEM needs to get a specialist on board a ship that’s already at sea to fix a problem. The vessel may have to divert from its mission to pick up this specialist, who will likely have had to travel a considerable distance to embark. In a commercial context, downtime and diversions like this can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars per day, per vessel. In a military context – of a Carrier Strike Group, for example – the ‘price’ skyrockets, a price paid not just in FIAT but in operational availability and potentially even mission success.
Genuine innovation isn’t always about developing new technologies – it’s about reconfiguring existing ones
Heads up & hands free: the ability to get information and expertise to the right people in the right format at the right time can enable a whole new level of collaboration within – and between – suppliers
By employing a technology like mixed reality, classification society inspectors can see what they need to see, ask the questions they need to ask, and capture the answers – all in real time and without having to board the ship. Similarly, an OEM specialist can work alongside a front-line engineer below the waterline without ever having to travel to theatre or risk ‘getting their feet wet’. They can share advice and insight – alongside the relevant checklists, wiring diagrams and visualisations – while the engineer stays heads-up and hands-free.
Mixed Reality lets operators extract the maximum value from existing investments in the many tools and technologies they already use to store, model, analyse, transmit, visualise and interact with data. Much of the digital content and much of the necessary supporting technologies like the satellite links and LTE connections are already available.
The benefits of a device- and network-agnostic MR solution are amplified when supporting collaboration among multiple organisations, not just two individuals. In an era in which even relatively small defence programmes may require dozens of partners to work on the design, delivery and ongoing in-service support of a given solution, the efficient and effective collaboration required relies on equally frictionless communication. Mixed Reality is positioned to be a key enabler in creating an ecosystem of collaboration in which industry and military can work together effectively.
If, as an industry, we can commit to reducing the frictions in our operations and communicating more effectively, then we can take collaboration to a new level. We can restore circulation to the extremities of industry and academia. We can ensure we’re ready to meet MoD’s – and NATO’s – challenge, and support the open, flexible, interoperable capabilities they require.
