ANDOVER — This is what a man cave for rocket scientists looks like:
An eight-foot-high stack of 72 ultrahigh-definition television sets arrayed in a 320-degree panorama, with 3-D technology so realistic it induces vertigo during a giddy flyover of Afghanistan, the perspective pitching and yawing over hills and under cloud cover.
This high-tech theater is part of the so-called Immersive Design Center that Raytheon Co. built at its missile center in Andover earlier this year. But the scientists and engineers who use it to design next-generation military systems really do just call it the Cave.
The whiz-bang effects aside, the Cave is a powerful tool that Raytheon and its suppliers use to see how a product such as the Patriot missile system is coming together, from the assembly of a multiton command truck to the shape of a tiny component such as an electronic circuit.
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Multiple Raytheon designers can use the Cave at the same time — some patched in remotely — to see how their work on one corner of the system dovetails with what their colleagues are doing elsewhere.
“We can have a bunch of people from different disciplines come in and sort of poke at a design,” said Bill Tice, an engineering manager who helps run the Cave. “In 3-D, you can literally dive in, look under it, around it, take it apart, and put it back together. We’re getting designs that are more efficient and easier to produce.”
A design team can spread its raw materials over the screens in the Cave as if it were using a conference room table: a few PowerPoint slides over there, a 3-D model here, a spreadsheet listing part costs on that monitor, a blank page for doodling in the corner.
And the Cave is networked, so workers at other Raytheon locations can remotely join the brainstorming sessions.
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“If we put the right people in this room, they’ll solve any problem,” said Tim Glaeser, a former Army air defense officer who commanded Patriot batteries in Iraq and is now the vice president in charge of the Patriot program. “From a technological perspective, there’s nothing this company can’t do.”
The Cave is a particularly powerful place for making the abstract tangible. It brings highly technical blueprints of a missile chassis to life as an immediately recognizable object and turns data spreadsheets into visualizations a lay person can see, touch, and manipulate. A soldier can walk into a full-scale 3-D simulation of a Patriot command center and change the layout of the equipment to make her job easier; an ergonomics expert can point out a too-tight clearance.
Raytheon calls this “the common language of visualization.”
The Patriot system includes a command trailer from which officers can fire missiles located at as many as 16 remote launching stations, and a separate radar set.
Already, the Cave is bearing fruit. Tice said an engineer at a Raytheon supplier noticed a problem with a Patriot component that his company had been hired to paint with a special coating.
“He told us that he never would have caught this unless he had seen it in the Cave, because it helped him visualize the contours of the component,” Tice said. “It saved him days of work.”
Tice says even skeptical Raytheon veterans are beginning to appreciate its capabilities.
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“When our gray-beard tech guys come in for a design review, they sometimes hang back and say, ‘It’s too glitzy for me,’ ” Tice said. “But when they see what it can do, they jump right in. You can see their minds turning around before your eyes. That’s satisfying.”
Most projects Raytheon works on in Andover are highly classified, which means the company does not often show off its work.
So a tour of its Andover campus, esconced within barbed-wire fencing and reinforced gates, is a rare moment of detente for the defense giant. Within Raytheon, it seems, the Cave is just too cool to keep under wraps.
“It’s a challenge to get the word out about classified stuff,” Glaeser admitted. “But if you want to understand Raytheon, you have to come talk to the people and see the technology.”
The Andover building offers a tour through time as much as through current technology. On display in the lobby are several large metal machines that trace the evolution of microwave technology from a military radar system used to detect enemy aircraft in World War II to a kitchen appliance that heats leftovers and popcorn.
Nearby is a prototype of the Hawk missile from the 1950s, one of the first guided surface-to-air missiles, the side panels removed to reveal its tangle of copper wires and bulky transistors. Even though the system is more than a half-century old, there are still Hawk missiles in the arsenals of more than a dozen countries. Incredibly, engineers at the Andover campus still provide support for the Hawk, akin to IBM’s fielding customer service calls about a malfunctioning punch-card computer.
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The Andover facility is so big — its main hallway nearly a mile long — that some staffers use golf carts to travel from one end to the other. Off that hallway is the machine shop, where experienced tradespeople who originally cut metal housings for the Patriot on machine lathes have since been retrained on computerized CNC machines.
“We had a guy retire recently who had been here for 42 years,” Glaeser said. “On his first day, he walked into an office full of T-squares and triangles. Computers didn’t exist.”
Even technology can’t automate every step of production. At the end of one hallway is a massive trailer-mounted radar array, its guts a soaring honeycomb of circuits and wires with so many intricate connections — about 118,000 — that a Raytheon employee makes them by hand, using a small wire-wrapping “gun.”
The Cave itself is behind a nondescript door off the main hallway. The bounty of technology on display was pioneered by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois and licensed to Iowa-based Mechdyne Corp., which helped install the system at Raytheon.
For all of the Cave’s allure, Raytheon staffers have not given in to the temptation to use it to, say, play an epic game of Halo, they said.
“Do we wish we could watch the Super Bowl in there?” Tice said. “Well, yeah. You could do all kinds of crazy stuff.”
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Dan Adams can be reached at dadams@globe.com. Find him on Twitter at @Daniel
Adams86.