Serious Gaming
MT2 2011 Volume: 16 Issue: 5 (August)
MT2 asked, “What role(s) will your company best fill as the United States military turns more to the use of serious gaming in an effort to reduce the military’s training costs while maintaining the combat readiness of the warfighter?”
Bohemia Interactive Simulations Group
Pete Morrison
Chief Executive Officer
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Bohemia Interactive has recently released a number of innovations that have moved the VBS2 product range into a class of ‘open platform’ and BI to the role of software developer and supplier. The results are an enhanced training experience for the modern warfighter and a product that integrators, other U.S. contractors, or even the U.S. military itself, can tailor to meet existing and emerging training requirements in a rapid, cost-effective manner.
Multi-channel support, terrain paging and SE Core integration secure VBS2’s position as the first true game-based image generator for simulation. Now a common game-based virtual environment (that is already licensed at the enterprise level) can be employed in any U.S. Army or USMC simulation system. Providing a common, standardized virtual environment effectively reduces overall training costs, through easing correlation issues and facilitating re-use.
Studies show serious games to be an effective and efficient means to augment live training. Thanks to U.S. military funding, VBS2 has evolved into a full-featured virtual simulation that is capable of deployment on a range of simulators. Service personnel now have access to a comprehensive training experience and trainers reduce the considerable logistical and financial commitment associated with live training.
Currently contracted by both the U.S. Army and USMC to extend VBS capability, Bohemia has a number of projects underway that will see VBS2 utilized on a range of procedural trainers in the near future. In the midst of a rapidly changing simulation industry Bohemia remains constant in its dedication to providing cost-effective solutions to ensure the combat readiness of our modern warfighters.
Calytrix
Shawn Parr
Chief Executive Officer
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Calytrix often describes itself as a ‘training integrator.’ Whether integrating serious games into larger training environments, overlaying cross-platform radio simulation solutions, or shaping the end training solution by blending military subject matter experts with technology, our core goal is to ensure that the systems applied meet and exceed the required training outcomes.
Integration is key to successful application of serious games into the training domain: Calytrix’s LVC Game has become the standard in serious games integration, with six major development partners using this platform (and more in-work) including VBS2, the de-facto standard in serious gaming for first-person 3-D infantry training. LVC Game lets serious games engage in the broader DIS/HLA/C2 training environment and also allows different games to interact. Our approach allows training providers to ‘pick and choose’ the right combination of games and systems to meet their needs. Our new LVC Touch extends this concept with a mobile situational awareness and C2 capability on a tablet computer (currently iPad; Android soon), keeping everyone in touch and in control from their tablet regardless of location.
Communications must remain a training focus: Training systems train people, and people must have communications. No matter how good the graphics, the scenarios or the terrain, training is focused on people and people need to talk with each other. Calytrix has created the CNR family of radio solutions, allowing exercise designers to establish radio networks that combine simulated and real radios with intuitive touch-screen displays and capture facilities for replay and AAR. Any computer can now listen, talk and replay any voice channel on any live or virtual network.
Experience shows that integration of data and communications underpin successful application of serious games into training, and this is Calytrix’s focus as we see more serious games adding value to the training domain.
CHI Systems
Benjamin Bell
Vice President and General Manager
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
It is widely accepted that game-based training can be a powerful cost-savings approach, because of the high cost of dedicated training devices that a serious game is often designed to replace. What is only now assuming more prominence in the discourse is the critical need for effective, recurring and on-demand team training. Team skills such as coordination and communication are now acknowledged as being just as central to the mission as weaponeering or stick-work. Team skills, however, are more sensitive than individual skills to decay in situations where practice opportunities (via simulation or gaming) emphasize the latter.
Distributed approaches to team training can combat this skill decay through the use of human role-players, evaluators and instructors. This approach requires a team to be synchronously in place and ready to train along with a complement of confederates and instructor/evaluators. These requirements add cost to training just when leadership is pursuing an aggressive program of budget contraction.
A solution to the decay of team-oriented skills, which is in close alignment with a cost savings posture, is to augment game-based simulation training with speech-enabled intelligent agents, which act as synthetic teammates in a serious game. CHI Systems provides synthetic teammate technology that can maximize readiness through on-demand access to high-fidelity training when human role-players and instructors are not available, and at significantly less cost.
Intelligent agents represent a key enabling technology as they provide a sufficiently high level of fidelity to act as team surrogates through their ability to represent complex human performance, decision-making and behaviors. For domains which involve complex, team-based communication, skills which are traditionally difficult to effectively train without human role-players, intelligent agents can be enhanced with speech-interactive capabilities. Such capabilities enable intelligent agents to reproduce the complex behavioral and decision-making skills necessary to enable on-demand communicationbased team training, and offer cost-effective alternatives to a military faced with an unfamiliar need for austerity measures.
DI-Guy
Marc Schlackman
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
DI-Guy is well positioned to support the military’s increased use of serious games to reduce training costs. Our software suite provides a portable library of human models and motions, a high performance motion engine and an extensive C++ API designed for tight integration with serious game applications. In addition, a wide range of renderers including OpenGL, DirectX, OpenSceneGraph, as well as an open user-customizable rendering interface are supported. The DI-Guy library includes thousands of models and motions, increasing the quality of a game’s human simulation while eliminating costs for 3-D modeling, motion capture and animation processing.
Our human behavior solutions, particularly DI-Guy AI, provide serious games with the middleware artificial intelligence functionality required to model intelligent human behavior. DI-Guy AI provides a sophisticated human simulation framework including user-modifiable intelligent agents, scripting tools and on-screen authoring techniques enabling scenario creators to cost-effectively populate their serious gaming scenarios with lifelike human characters. DI-Guy AI functionality can be directly compiled into a serious game or federated via the DI-Guy Lifeform Server to support Blufor, Opfor, and the critical civilian ‘pattern of life’ activity needed to simulate the real world challenges faced when combating insurgents embedded in the general populace.
To give a concrete example of our solutions being used by the United States military for maintaining and improving warfighter effectiveness in a serious games environment, DI-Guy is used by the Marine Corps Tactics and Operations Group to train officers in Enhanced Company Operations (ECO). The ECO Simulation system trains officers to sift through the enormous amount of information at their disposal and make correct tactical decisions. The visualization and AI behavior of hundreds and thousands of human entities, including Marine squads, mortar teams, OPFOR fighters, IED networks and civilians are all handled by DI-Guy.
Heartwood
Raj Raheja
Chief Executive Officer
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Big Problem
It is now clear that for true combat readiness, the requirement for the next generation of serious games/3-D simulations is not just focused on the quality and fidelity of the training, but ‘when’ and ‘where’ it can be accessed. With all the different devices, OSs, and visual systems in the market, a major cost point is going to be re-purposing these simulations for ‘just-in-time’ delivery, beyond the schoolhouse onto the web and handheld devices.
Heartwood’s Solution
Ubiquity. We author these simulations once, and publish them to a variety of delivery options—PC, Mac, Xbox, PS3, Wii, web-based browsers, Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad). Furthermore, we extend the life cycle of a 3-D digital asset by embedding it in four stages of training:
- Stand-alone schoolhouse applications—PC-based
- Self-paced lessons—web-based in-browser delivery
- Offsite portable re-learning— mobile/handheld apps
- Augmented reality 3-D applications for real-time ‘over the shoulder’ assist
This reduces the amortized cost of the initial production effort, allowing for more ROI on each dollar invested.
SIMmersion
Dale Olsen
President
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Virtual world simulations used to develop serious games help reduce training costs, are easy to distribute, and have increase training efficacy. However, the conversations with simulated characters in the virtual worlds are highly restricted by the complexity of real conversations and often provide virtual characters that are little more than targets. This conversational limitation makes the development of many computer-based training systems required for modern warfare impossible, leaving a technology gap that needs to be filled for training mission-critical training topics like cultural awareness, negotiation, suicide intervention, human intelligence, performance counseling and hundreds of others.
SIMmersion’s simulation technology was developed to fill this gap by supporting the need for role plays and has led to 11 DoD contracts. These level 4 interactive training systems can now be delivered as a SCORM-compliant web-based application, as a thin client application, on DVDs, and most recently through mobile platforms like smartphones. These systems can be made 508 compliant.
As with most skill development, repeated practice with consistent feedback is required. SIMmersion’s technology is used to develop training systems that provide the opportunity to repeatedly practice difficult conversations while allowing learners to gain new experiences with each unpredictable conversation. Trainees can talk with virtual characters using a microphone. The characters have memory and an advanced emotional model so that they respond to the trainees as a real person would. The nearly free-form conversation is different every time the simulation is used and can last for over an hour. Extensive feedback is provided both during and after the conversation.
The traditional branching simulations are essentially multiple choice tests where the user must select the best choice from a small number of options. SIMmersion’s approach requires the learner to think about what to say and when to say it, helping them to develop much more advanced cognitive skills.
Sundog Software LLC
Frank Kane
Founder
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
At Sundog Software, our SilverLining technology for real-time visual simulation of time of day and weather effects is widely used in both the game and simulation industries. What’s interesting is how the needs of these two industries drive innovation that benefit each other and keeps costs low.
The market of game developers is a large one, but largely made up of independent developers and startups that don’t have a huge budget. This forces us to keep our prices low enough for small companies to afford, which in turn keeps prices low for simulation and training customers. At Sundog, we’re very transparent about our licensing costs— our licensing price is listed for all to see on our website and we don’t attempt to negotiate higher prices for bigger customers. Instead, we find that bigger customers tend to become repeat customers, because they like the simplicity of dealing with us and are happy with our product and support.
Game developers on the PC platform also demand high performance on a wide range of hardware, which results in better system compatibility for our simulation customers. Conversely, the high performance requirements of flight simulators drive performance benefits for our game customers. Simulation and training customers also demand physical realism that results in better visuals for all of our customers. And, as serious games become more widespread in training, our work to integrate with game engines becomes leveraged in both worlds. The two customer bases are very symbiotic. SilverLining’s technology, when integrated with an image generator, provides visual simulation of any time of day at any location on or above the planet, under any weather conditions— situations that are difficult or impossible to control in live training. We’re proud to offer this to the warfighter at the same low cost for gamers.
Vcom3D
Dan Silverglate
Director, Software and Graphics
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Vcom3D develops serious games that feature virtual humans whose behaviors support the detailed and authentic faceto- face interactions needed for training social skills, cross-cultural competency and health care. These simulated behaviors include non-verbal cues such as facial expression, focus of attention and gesture, as well as speech with accurate lip-sync to any language. The simulations are based on extensive research into human behavior and how it varies across cultures and as a function of cognitive and physiological state.
At the heart of Vcom3D’s technology is a plug-and-play architecture that supports cost-effective development for multiple game engines and virtual worlds and multiple hardware platforms, including Apple and Android smartphones and tablets, as well as Windows PCs. Since tailoring has the potential to be costly and time-consuming, Vcom3D has developed authoring tools that speed the development of serious games by automating difficult animation tasks such as lip-sync to all languages, interacting with objects, and representing appropriate non-verbal cues. In contrast to traditional live training, individual elements of a game can be modified and extended without requiring access to expensive acting talent. Thus, a mission scenario can be modified to represent a different service or location by changing uniforms, environments, language, or even social protocol while maintaining other game elements.
Vcom3D is also advancing pedagogical methods for serious games by applying research into the science of learning. This includes training the learner to conduct missions in new environments by observing and adapting to cultural differences. The result is warfighters who can recognize, respect and reconcile these differences while achieving mission goals.
Finally, Vcom3D is using gaming technology on mobile devices to provide just-in-time training and mission performance aids for operation and maintenance of equipment and for language and culture.
Virtual Simulations Inc.
Marc Bernatchez
President
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
One of the key elements of our strategy is to offer reconfigurable simulation platforms. By doing so, the client can acquire the simulator hardware and then reuse it for many applications, by means of using different software on the same hardware. Think of a flight simulator platform that can be virtually upgraded such that MPDs, HUD and other controls can be changed without modifying the physical simulator cockpit. Pushing this even further, you can simulate F16, F18 and F22 with the same physical platform.
Another element in our strategy is to provide integration with high-end virtual reality technologies, not just entry-level serious game type of applications. This means full body tracking and high immersion, using HMDs or wide field of view projected stereoscopic devices.
We also aim to offer much more advanced user interface than what is currently available. Designing user interfaces in the context of using them into a 3-D space is quite different than conventional 2-D interfacing techniques. Based on actual research with human subjects, we bring user interfaces that offer the fastest and easiest interaction between the user and the simulated environment, based on scientific measured statistical data.
Being virtual by nature, these simulated training tools allow trying things that you would not normally consider or dare trying. It allows the trainee to go beyond the real limits and see the consequences, which could be deadly in real life, within a safe virtual environment context.
The cost of a virtual system may still be sizable, but it quickly becomes much cheaper than the real equipment when you start considering large and complex equipment. Virtual systems are reconfigurable, meaning the same hardware can be reused to simulate many different contexts, with much lesser cost software updates. This is where virtual gets better than the real thing as the cost associated with it grows at a much slower pace than if you consider buying new real equipment each time you need to train on a new vehicle for instance.
Visual Purple LLC
Ed Heinbockel
President
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Today’s warfighters have been raised on video games. They learn differently than past generations. By recognizing and leveraging the learning styles appropriate to current trainees, 3-D animated decisionbased virtual world training offers instruction that is relevant and effective—with improvement in both motivation to train and knowledge retention—this type of training is proven to be very, very sticky.
Through the use of 3-D animated decision-based serious game training, a platform is presented to today’s warfighter that is immediately recognizable and significantly more palatable than traditional PowerPoint-type ‘page flip’ training. By offering simulation training aimed at individuals rather than large groups, training can take place anytime and anywhere the trainee has access to a computer, while non-virtual training can accommodate only a limited number of instructors and students at any given time. Refinement of training content is a continuing requirement necessary to ensure that warfighters have the latest and most relevant training possible.
One of the many benefits of Visual Purple’s training products is our proven technologies that allow for rapid updates and changes. Unlike some training programs that are difficult to make changes and/or updates to, Visual Purple simulations can easily be ‘remodeled’ later should the need arise. The number of true subject matter experts (SMEs) is limited. By incorporating SMEs’ expertise into learning content, the impact they provide is expanded to cover the entire training audience. Improvements in hardware capability have allowed for significant improvements in graphics and training technologies. More ‘horsepower’ in smaller packages (smartphones, touchpads, tablets, etc.) allows warfighters to train anytime and anywhere. These mission rehearsal modeling tools are aiding in overall military readiness by streamlining training capabilities. One thing is for sure: it beats the so-called BOGSAT (or Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table). Emerging technologies are changing the way today’s military trains-up. ♦