An Immersive Intercultural Trainer that Adapts to Trainees"Intercultural Competence

We propose to develop a cultural training virtual environment that enables trainees to develop and practice their intercultural skills. It will enable trainees to enter the virtual environment multiple times, and explore the effects of their cultural actions on the local population. The level of the difficulty of the training environment will be controllable, both the cultural environment and the cultural sensitivity of the virtual role players. Alelo has extensive experience in creating immersive cultural training environments. We propose to team with Electrical Geodesics (EGI) to incorporate neurometric sensors and processing, in order to meet the objectives of this solicitation. To accomplish the goals of this solicitation, we plan to leverage an existing language and culture training environment, namely Virtual Role Players (VRP). Following the work of the Defense Regional and Cultural Capabilities Assessment Working Group (RACCA WG), we will model cultural aptitude as a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. We will train all three aspects within the context of the immersive trainer.We will extend the VRP architecture to incorporate simulated populations, and address varying levels of training difficulty.