As part of a fast-track procurement process Christie has recently installed a new Command & Control Room for the Ministry of Defence at the headquarters of the British Defence Communication Services Agency (DCSA), based in Corsham.
The Control Room Solution
The whole fast-track programme took a little over one hundred days, from putting out to tender, to installation and for the control room to become fully operational.
The DCSA and the MOD specified a Command & Control Room that would promote speedy decision making - particularly at critical moments. The facility would provide for the simultaneous display of any of the DCSA networked workstations, offer secure video conferencing facilities and the display of up to four live PC inputs. Furthermore the facility could be used by both the DCSA operational team within the command room and by key decision-makers situated in the headquarters main conference and briefing room.
A full technical design brief was produced, centred on a 5m x 3m videowall. The wall is in effect one large display screen, built up from twelve 67in diagonal screens in a 4 x 3 matrix. The display wall is controlled using a Windows NT based operating system, in conjunction with twelve (one for each screen) Christie RPMs (rear projection modules) and an ENT 3000 display wall controller.
Needless to say the installed display wall accommodates four live PC inputs, which are used for Windows NT, Sky TV, terrestrial TV and DVD or VCR, and the existing videoconferencing system from the conference room has been seamlessly incorporated into the new command centre.
Combined together in the application, the RPMs and ENT controller enable the display of up to eight of a possible 13 different operator-selectable feeds onto the videowall at one time, and each of these images can be independently stretched or shrunk, overlapped or butted together at will by the operator. The active PC feeds can also be scaled up or down to cover from a single screen to the entire display wall
The videowall display dominates the control room, allowing the national communications networks for the entire combined forces to be monitored. The operations room manager predominantly runs the system, video and audio tie lines are passed through the floor with inputs from both the operations and conference rooms under control from a master touch screen. The master control system has been designed to show a number of PC displays' real time operational information as well as monitoring video signals and TV news stations. In addition to viewing any of the ground floor sources, the master control can routing its own PC and auxiliary video sources to the display wall.
In this mode the control room will use the wall to provide large screen presentations for high level briefings and the general dissemination of information to the DCSA team. The RPM's unique digital smoothing and digital colour space control come into their own in such situations - compensating for traditional edge drop-offs by offering additional brightness enhancements and allowing the communication of files generated by PowerPoint, Excel and Word to be clearly displayed to large audiences.
In a stand-alone condition the room is capable of holding PC and video presentations onto two installed plasma displays and a portable projector.