The U. S. Department of Defense deploys civilians to Afghanistan and Iraq to provide engineering, logistical, financial, and security support to ministerial-level officials and organizations. Those civilians are prepared for deployment in a program that includes cultural familiarization training through participation in live vignettes that recreate meetings and encounters with foreign government officials, military and police personnel, and private citizens. In those vignettes the officials are portrayed by human role-players who enact their roles based on scripts and their own personal knowledge of the culture and roles they are depicting. In the Congressionally-mandated study reported on in this paper, emerging modeling and simulation technologies in the areas of virtual environments, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence are being examined to determine the feasibility of replacing the human role-players in this training with virtual characters, or avatars, in a virtual environment. A decomposition of an interaction between a trainee and a role-player avatar reveals that several technologies must operate at a high level of effectiveness to satisfy the training requirements.
['Mikel D. Petty', 'Walter S. Barge']
Emerging modeling and simulation technologies needed to implement cultural familiarization training in virtual environments (WIP)