back to article So, you know those exciting movie-style 3D visual cyber attack ops centres?

Airbus has been awarded a contract worth £1.4m to "develop and mature" a movie-style 3D Virtual Cyber Centre of Operations (VCCO) for the Ministry of Defence. The research contract engages Airbus to develop a "3-D virtual world to enable collaboration and shared situational awareness," across a sprawling network of security …

  1. Suricou Raven

    Sounds expensive.

  2. Mark 85

    Bah....

    What? No holographic screens and images seemingly floating in mid-air? No flashing lights that flicker in sync when the computer talks? No minions in spiffy uniforms? What movie style cyber center are they thinking of then?

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Bah....

      You forget the bridge bunnies!

    2. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Bah....

      Jurassic park. Coffee cups, mountains of paper and Twix wrappers piled onto a Unix machine running Button Fly that a 12 year old can operate.

    3. Captain DaFt

      Re: Bah....

      "No holographic screens and images seemingly floating in mid-air?"

      Yeah, whatever happened to volumetric displays, any way?

      https://youtu.be/9af-aX-UDDM

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: Bah....

        Quite literally vapourware.

  3. Joe 48

    So basically

    1.4 Million to make the below work with a 3D headset...

    http://map.ipviking.com/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So basically

      Wow, that's pretty cool. I rather hope that's a real thing and not just someone's simulation for Kickstarter :P

    2. Graham Marsden
      Coat

      Re: So basically

      The only winning move is not to play...

    3. Jes.e

      Re: So basically

      Interesting web site.

      Even more interesting is that no Flash was used in their web pages..

      The company must be serious about security.

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    Sounds cool but...

    ...it will probably be the Gannt chart of the 21st century: Useless and something for management to look at while delaying taking responsibility.

    No, wait, this is civil serpentry. Scratch the "taking responsibility" part.

  5. Alister

    MooD's Chief Strategy Officer, Dick Whittington

    Some parents have a lot to answer for...

    Where's his cat?, And why isn't he Lord Mayor of London?

  6. TheFinn

    Bloody loads of VR sets are about to hit the market but nooooooo, WE'LL take the FIRST! THAT'S mature thinking, innit?

  7. Dave 126 Silver badge

    Article picture...

    ... show's Pingu from Nathan Barley. It's nice to view the James Bond films as being a sequel to Barley, in which Pingu is no longer a Flash animator for the original Shoreditch twat and has got himself a proper job with the government.

  8. Slacker@work

    Sooooo

    a) somebody has been binge reading William Gibson again

    b) "Oculus Rift as a potential interface" is this to give a tighter integration to Facebook?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Sooooo

      This is the Civil Service. They probably started the process of writing the original attempt at the tender when the Rift was announced and it's just taken this long for the bureaucracy to let it get as far as actually telling anyone about it...

  9. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Flame

    Those MoD cuts

    Good to see they're in it with the rest of us in Austerity Britain and trimming the unessential fat.

    1. A Ghost
      Stop

      Re: Those MoD cuts

      You made a typo and left out a letter.

      These people are criminally insane.

  10. BoldMan

    Another pointless waste of cash that should be going to employing proper troops.... oh well its a new toy for the Whitehall boys to play with...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      ...and probably more importantly, for some minister to impress himself with.

  11. sysconfig

    £1.4m doesn't sound a lot...

    ...for a project like this involving several contractors over several months. I guess it's one of those Gov IT (or MoD IT?) projects that will go on forever and provide a large sink for money. (Certainly larger than anticipated.)

    1. Chris G

      Re: £1.4m doesn't sound a lot...

      Airbus adds: "This contract will help us study how British forces can stay ahead of the curve."

      Could buy £1.4m worth of decent boots for a start.

  12. Sproing
    Devil

    It'll be used by bean counters

    Having been involved in getting Highly Immersive Visualisation Environments up and going ( basically three high resolution projectors giving you a curved screen roughly the size of the local cinema ), you find that the main use is not for the display of spiffy, multi-coloured spinny super-shiny graphics, but for spreadsheets.

    Apparently it's all about the number of cells on display.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Big and flashy, or useful?

    A friend who works for a large anti-virus firm and told me they had a big nasa-type control room full of impressive map displays showing outbreaks, but it was only used when the journalists dropped by.

    The real work was done a level below in an electronically hardened bunker by people working with the command line and disassemblers. Good.

  14. Wolfclaw

    Waste Of Money

    What MOD should have done is bank the £1.4m and any overuns and extensions etc etc and buy whatever the yanks are developing, minus the backdoors. The exact same kit mind you, not the yanks buy the F35A which works while, MOD buys F35C which is a piece of joke !

  15. WalterAlter
    Go

    Yah, that's the ticket, centralize your intel HQ in the digital age...

    and help out your enemy's attack logistics. Slaps forehead. Goes "Ow!". Removes glasses. Slaps forehead.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What will be hillarious will be when some kids with the technology support equivalent of changing the lightbulb to go to red alert on 5th user p200 laptops but a whole boatload of low level knowledge about os innards give the newly cyber defended systems a good kicking.

    Love to be a fly on the wall with lots of charged up civil serpent types with a budget of millions who recruited all their mates because thats how things work all running round shouting buzzwords vs some kids with a old laptop.

    Anon but whats the real point nowadays, I want to go do something honest like play piano in a whorehouse instead of working in IT security nowadays anyway.

  17. Roj Blake Silver badge

    Just What's Needed

    This is just what's needed to provide command and control to the four tanks and twenty soldiers that we'll be able to afford after we've paid for this.

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