State-driven Customizations for Optimizing Personal Effectiveness of Virtual Training Environments (SCOPE)

The Army is moving towards widespread use of live, virtual, constructive, and gaming (LVCG) training environments. While these systems offer advantages over traditional training in terms of cost and effectiveness, they are not sufficiently flexible to enable instructors and researchers to rapidly modify the environment in response to trainee state. Specifically, customizations to virtual training environments (VTEs) may (1) be difficult for these individuals to author due to requirements for programming expertise; (2) fail to make widespread use of available models due to difficulties in integrating models coded in a variety of different formats; and (3) fail to modify VTEs in a consistent manner due to the need to modify source code of every environment that a customization is applied to. To address these needs, Charles River Analytics proposes to design and demonstrate the feasibility of State-driven Customizations for Optimizing Personal Effectiveness of Virtual Training Environments (SCOPE), an intuitive, system-agnostic framework and graphical editing environment that allows researchers and instructors to define trainee state-driven customizations (TSCs) for VTEs. SCOPE includes a highly intuitive visual authoring tool for defining TSCs, a flexible application programming interface (API) for integrating various model formats, and an API for interfacing with VTEs.