SBIR-STTR Award

For this SBIR project, Vcom3D and our partners at Soar Technology propose to develop a toolkit for rapidly creating Serious Games that train tactical application of cultural knowledge in authentic, experiential environments. This toolkit will extend the two Company’s platform independent Plug-and-Play Cultural Avatar (PnPCA) architecture by providing tools to rapidly create new scenarios that can incorporate emerging commercial and open source speech and gesture recognition technologies, speech generation, and ingestion of new cultural data. A key feature of the toolkit will be to make scenario authoring, performance monitoring, and performance remediation available to the actual users of the serious games. Critical components of the technology will be demonstrated on multiple platforms, including mobile, Web-based, and multi-user virtual world environments.

Keywords:
Culture, Serious Games, Authoring Tools, Nonverbal Behavior,Avatar, Plug And Play, Training, Virtual Environment, Game Engine

For this Phase II SBIR project, Vcom3D, with Soar Technology as subcontractor, proposes to develop a toolkit for rapidly creating Serious Games that train tactical application of cultural knowledge in authentic, experiential environments. This toolkit will extend the two companies’ platform independent Plug-and-Play Cultural Avatar (PnPCA) architecture by providing tools to create new, cross-platform scenarios that can be integrated with commercial and open source game engine and speech recognition technologies. These scenarios will include non-player characters that behave according to culturally differentiated values, schemas, and physical behaviors. In order to evaluate the authoring tools and cultural models, we will use them to create two prototype training scenarios. These will be evaluated for training and cost effectiveness.

Keywords:
Culture, Serious Games, Authoring Tools, Nonverbal Behavior, Avatar, Plug And Play, Training, Virtual Environment, Game Engine