Tampa, Florida -- This week is the deadline if you want to help a team from Tampa protect America by bringing video games and comic books to life.
SOCOM at MacDill Air Force Base is in charge of making sure America's top troops have the world's top technology. So they're asking people to send their wildest ideas to Tampa by April 2nd.
What they're looking for at U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, comes right out of comic books, sci-fi, and video games.
- A real device that can see through walls, like Superman's x-ray vision.
- Something that can disable a car but not hurt anyone inside, like a freeze ray from a Batman villain.
- A holographic 3-D table for mission planning, seen in Star Wars movies.
- A gadget that can track someone's health, even from a distance, similar to Mr. Spock's tricorder on Star Trek.
- A device that can instantly map any room, acting like the mini-map in the corner of many video games.
- Glasses that can show any info, hovering in space, right in a soldier's line of sight, similar to the displays that line the edges of the screens in combat video games.
SOCOM in Tampa wants universities, private companies, mad scientists -- anyone -- to submit ideas by the end of this week.
"Tampa has turned into one of the places where the biggest technology development is happening in the country," Tony Davis, the head of all technology research for SOCOM, told me Monday on 10 News this Morning.
"We've got a great base here of technology investment from academia and from larger companies. It's kind of an innovation combustion chamber."
If the military team in Tampa likes your pitch, they'll invite your group to show it off in June at a creepy, abandoned state hospital in Indiana.
The testing ground, called the Mascatatuck Urban Training Center, has mock disaster zones, man-made caves, even a simulated market right out of the Middle East.
At Mascatatuck, tech geniuses from SOCOM in Tampa will work with inventors from around the world and actual "special operators," the toughest troops on earth. SOCOM calls it "technical experimentation."
"We have actual [Special Operations Forces] operators providing real feedback to the technology developer to kind of shorten that decision loop," Davis told me.
"What can you do with this product to make it more useful to us -- smaller, better, faster?"
The aim is to use the ideas and instincts of SOCOM's team -- your neighbors here in Tampa Bay -- to make sure America's Special Operations Forces always have an advantage over anyone they face.
Davis said if SOCOM likes an idea, they'll put it on the fast-track to get it to fighters in the real world.
New gear, including accessories to make drones more powerful and useful, has already been sent into combat after growing out of past technical experimentation sessions like the one that's happening in June, Davis said.
