Virtual Simulation Tools for Cultural Familiarization

"In the coming decade, the U.S. military will become increasingly engaged in a variety of activities unlike the conventional military engagements of the past. Such "Operations Other Than War" (OOTW) depend on the ability of U.S. troops to understand andnegotiate a complex of societal and cultural structures that may be entirely different from their own. The limited, textbook-form cultural familiarization that currently exists is not made available to the majority of armed forces members who maypotentially engage in OOTW. New training technologies, including virtual environments and synthetic actors based on agents, offer the potential to provide experiential, scenario-based training that is effective, rapid, and widely available. The proposedresearch effort, VECTOR (Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness), will pursue development of agent, interaction, and virtual environment technologies for developing training systems across a range of deployable andtraining-center-based configurations. In addition to broad cultural familiarization (place, language, and customs), mission-specific training (procedures, tactics, techniques, and rules of engagement) can be supported. The Phase I effort will result in aproof-of-concept demonstration, an architecture and plan for Phase II implementation of a working, single-scenario prototype system, as well as a plan for commercialization and transition. VECTOR will provid