Dismounted Infantry Situational Awareness Assessment in Virtual Simulations

"Dismounted Infantry training systems which make use of Distributed Simulation networks in Virtual Environments (VE) enable After Action Review of exercises such that "what" happened during an exercise can be reviewed by the trainees. The ability todetermine "why" events happened and "how to improve" team and team leader performance can only be understood if more abstract, derived data representing the Situational Awareness (SA) of the team and team leader during an exercise is captured and reviewed.Current SA techniques disrupt the continuity of exercises. The Army requires new tools and techniques such that trainees and researchers can capture SA data during an exercise, but review it and analyze it later with powerful AAR and analytical tools. M¿KTechnologies proposes to team with Firearms Training Systems (FATS) to develop a general purpose Distributed Simulation Data Analysis Tool (VR-Data) which will be customized for Dismounted Infantry Situational Awareness analysis. VR-Data will be a generalpurpose data analysis product which will work on either DIS or HLA networks, and will incorporate a widely-used COTS data analysis package, making it useful for any distributed simulation exercise analysis. FATS will then take this generic product andcustomize it for DI SA applications. This effort will result in several benefits that will help the US Army DI SA training and research community. An instrumented COTS product line will exi