As carriers add more uncrewed aircraft, today's control systems still put one operator alone at one console. CARE is a room-scale command center that lets a full crew supervise the swarm together instead.

The Navy has begun installing carrier-based drone control centers: the Unmanned Air Warfare Center (UAWC) aboard USS George H.W. Bush is the first, with rollout planned across all Nimitz- and Ford-class carriers. These centers currently control single platforms like the MQ-25 Stingray through per-platform Ground Control Stations (GCS). But the Navy has stated that 60% or more of future carrier air wings will be uncrewed, and autonomous "wingman" aircraft are being built directly into the carrier's Combat Information Center (CIC). A console-per-platform model doesn't scale to a swarm. The interface problem shifts from "how does one operator fly one drone" to "how does a CIC crew maintain shared awareness over a swarm running a persistent surveillance sweep across multiple sectors at once." Nothing fielded today, or published in the immersive-interface research it would draw from (I3's VR control, MR-SLAM's mixed reality, Flying Together's shared control), solves the team version of that problem. Each is single-headset, single-operator; none has a mechanism for a second crew member to be present.

Built with CAVE technology, projected walls and floor surround the crew instead of a private headset for one person. The floor renders as a shared tactical map; the walls map to distinct airspace zones; wand-driven gestures highlight a point, or a full three-dimensional volume of airspace, visible to the whole crew at once, not one operator's private screen. The tracked operator sets tasking for the surveillance sweep (which sectors to cover, which contacts to keep watching) and monitors outcomes: supervisory control, not per-platform piloting. The rest of the CIC crew, and the Air Wing Commander deciding where to send the swarm next, engage that shared display from wall- and floor-based positions, the way a real CIC works. Underneath, an AI control layer adapts swarm behavior to the contested and degraded conditions a carrier operates in, while a routing and coordination layer, already validated on AERPAW, a national aerial wireless testbed, handles task assignment across the swarm. A feed adapter treats live telemetry, simulator data, and recorded sessions as interchangeable, so training and mission rehearsal use the same interface as live operations.

CARE doesn't compete with the Navy's existing GCS consoles as a platform-control system: it's the layer above them, where a full crew, and the officer directing them, supervise what they already fly. The innovation isn't the projector hardware: it's the interface layer that makes AERPAW-validated swarm routing, self-configuring network setup, and AI-driven adaptive control, resilient to contested and unreliable conditions, usable by one crew watching one shared picture. It requires no new aircraft, no new comms architecture, and no prototype to prove the concept: the CAVE hardware and this integration are already in development. The same principle scales to the field: networked Quest 3 headsets could extend one shared picture to infantry, not isolated private views.