SBIR-STTR Award

Plug and Play Cultural Avatars for Training
Award last edited on: 5/18/2011

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : OSD
Total Award Amount
$99,997
Award Phase
1
Solicitation Topic Code
OSD09-HS2
Principal Investigator
Glenn Taylor

Company Information

Soar Technology Inc (AKA: SoarTech)

3600 Green Court Suite 600
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
   (734) 627-8072
   info@soartech.com
   www.soartech.com
Location: Multiple
Congr. District: 12
County: Washtenaw

Phase I

Contract Number: ----------
Start Date: ----    Completed: ----
Phase I year
2010
Phase I Amount
$99,997
Immersive training environments tend to be good at graphics, but lack realistic cultural content, especially in regard to highly interactive cultural characters. There is a growing gap created by the ever-increasing need for realistic cultural training and the lack of availability of interactive cultural training environments. There are a number of ongoing efforts aimed at building cultural models. However, these models often suffer from low fidelity expression of cultural behavior, are typically tied to particular virtual environment platforms, and lack natural modes of interaction with trainees. With our partners at Vcom3D, we have been developing portable cultural avatars that combine the cognitive and physical aspects of cultural behavior, can generate realistic facial expressions and cultural gestures, and which have been inserted in a number of virtual environments. We propose to extend this existing work to include (1) new input and output modalities (e.g., gesture and speech), (2) scenario-building tools, and (3) after-action review capabilities, to simultaneously increase the state of the art in interactive cultural training while decreasing the cost to build and deploy those models in realistic training scenarios.

Keywords:
Cultural Immersion, Virtual Training Environments, Computer Generated Forces, Interactive Cultural Models

Phase II

Contract Number: ----------
Start Date: ----    Completed: ----
Phase II year
----
Phase II Amount
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