Haptics Ontology and Peripheral Layer for Integrative Training Environments (HOPLITE)

Although Care Under Fire (CUF) involves the highest levels of risk, mission criticality, and time-critical life saving techniques of the three phases of Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), it receives the least attention in current TCCC training programs. The reactive, uncertain, and fire-focused nature of CUF does not lend itself to the current TCCC procedural and classroom-based training methods. Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality simulations—i.e., extended reality, or XR—provide a novel training solution for highly situational, risky, dynamic scenarios, such as CUF. As XR technology and training applications have flourished in recent years, XR-enabled haptics peripherals have emerged as a new area for research and innovation. Haptics-enhanced XR simulations have improved immersion and training outcomes because they can more closely emulate the task- and training-critical haptic feedback of a real-world scenario. Unfortunately, despite the promise of this technology, there is currently no XR-based or haptics-enhanced training for the CUF phase of TCCC.  To address this gap, Charles River Analytics and our retired military TCCC subject matter expert teammates, along with TMST Consultants, Orlando-based military modeling and simulation (M&S) and Synthetic Training Environment (STE) transition experts, propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Haptics Ontology and Peripheral Layer for Integrative Training Environments (HOPLITE). HOPLITE is an open-architecture XR toolkit that enables rapid and flexible development of ecologically valid, haptics-integrated, extensible CUF XR training scenarios that represent the critical physical, dynamic, and stress-inducing elements of CUF. HOPLITE will be built on Charles River’s Army-funded open-source XR software development kit, VIRTUOSO SDK (VSDK), which is available for download at https://github.com/charles-river-analytics/VSDK, so we can leverage VSDK’s open-architecture, plug-and-play development approach.  HOPLITE’s design accounts for the specific nuances of CUF, and will be implemented using an applied empirical approach that leverages Critical Incident Technique (CIT) and Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) modeling in conjunction with SME inputs to focus on the key training elements of CUF. We will analyze the perceptual cues and heuristics which medical and non-medical combatants use to make decisions in the field to directly inform the user interactions and haptic primitives necessary to develop CUF-specific haptic displays and device support. HOPLITE will be designed with both the trainer and the trainee in mind, enabling configuration of variable and diverse CUF training scenarios through user-friendly scenario editing interfaces and seamless integration with existing training simulations, such as STE.