feature article

March 2007

Army simulation tracks special operators’ physical, mental reactions

By Grace Jean

In a mountainous landscape, software engineer Jason Mohr guides a virtual U.S. soldier to a narrow wooden bridge, where an Afghan leader meets him. He greets the villager and tries to negotiate passage across the bridge.

As they converse, an instructor monitors the scenario from another computer that receives Mohr’s physiological and psychological states from a special wireless headset worn by the player. Red and blue lines chart escalations in his physical and mental responses as Mohr repeatedly is denied permission to cross the bridge.

Such technology is being integrated into a training simulation developed by North Carolina-based Virtual Heroes Inc., for the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.

The simulation — based on the “America’s Army” gaming technology — already is part of the center’s adaptive thinking and leadership training program, and the biometric measurement capability is being rolled out and tested there this month.

Training soldiers for special operations missions that may include negotiations and other diplomatic situations requires instructors to hone students’ cognitive and interpersonal skills.

Physiological data, such as heart and respiration rates, can clue them in to emotional responses that may have an impact on their performance in real-life settings.

“Our soldiers need to be able to function in extremely high-stress environments, so any experience that we can give them to be better at that, and give them increased self-knowledge about how they tend to respond, will be more effective for them,” says Maj. Edwin Deagle III, senior leadership training developer at the special warfare center and school.

In the past, negotiation training at the center was conducted through a series of lectures and practical exercises that required face-to-face interactions between students and role-players.

“The cross-cultural aspect really wasn’t effectively being conveyed when we did this in classroom exercises, because you knew you were talking to sergeant so-and-so, or captain so-and-so. So we went looking for ways to enhance the training exercises,” says Deagle.

Three years ago the school found a way by adapting “America’s Army” to fit into its training curriculum. The resulting advanced thinking and leadership simulation immerses Special Forces in a realistic environment to test negotiation skills before meeting role-players face-to-face in mock villages during live exercises.

After completing classroom training, soldiers sit down at computers and don headsets outfitted with microphones that enable communications with teammates and role players.

Virtual Heroes provided voice-masking capabilities in the game so that players couldn’t easily recognize their classmates.

“This provides a layer — an ‘enemy’ — they can hide behind,” says Mohr.

Once the virtual drill is completed, instructors take students through an evaluation, or after-action review, to discuss how they fared. More often than not, they have to rely upon students’ recollections and reasoning.

“In these training environments, there’s a lot of subjective information that’s collected,” says Randy Brown, chief technical officer for Virtual Heroes.

“One of the reasons that we were interested in looking at physiological vectors was to have an additional measurement other than self reporting,” says Deagle. Physical responses are more objective and “people tend to believe in the data a little bit more,” he adds.

Correlating those physical responses to events and actions in a session can help students pinpoint triggering factors and improve their abilities.

To capture the physiological data, Virtual Heroes turned to a commercially available headset technology, made by EmSense Corp. Sensors at contact points on the ear and on the forehead can capture temperature, detect motion and monitor blood volume, pulse and breathing. Two electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors monitor the electrical activity in the brain. All of these components generate “virtual vectors” that the gaming company could then incorporate into the simulation, says Brown.

The special warfare center and school specified two virtual vectors for incorporation into the simulation. One was a physical response vector, to capture soldiers’ adrenaline “rush,” and the other was a mental response vector, to represent when soldiers processed novel information.

In the simulation, students are assigned roles on a Special Forces team and are given various missions. They move around and interact with other participants from a first-person point of view. When a player has a mental response, a blue exclamation point icon pops over the avatar’s head in the instructor’s view screen.

Software engineers created a charting capability to record such processes in real-time. Red and blue lines form waves in these charts, much like the waves on a medical electrocardiogram.

“If you’re negotiating with somebody, and you become frustrated … then the red would climb,” says Mohr.

Only the instructor is privy to the data during game play, and he can flag or bookmark specific events for later evaluation and discussion.

Instructors not only can monitor a game, but they also can escalate events by inserting explosions or sniper fire into a scenario or having the opposing team up the ante in negotiations.

Mohr recounts an experience playing as the mayor of a town, in which he made it extremely difficult for a colleague to negotiate his way across a bridge.

“You would see a blue spike as he was thinking about how to respond to what I just said,” he says. In addition to having the commander fix a broken-down truck and leave behind troops to protect the village from insurgents, Mohr demanded $10,000 for access to the bridge.

“I saw a huge frustration spike at that, because he’d thought he’d had it,” he says.

In the after-action review screen, one bar represents the entire session. An instructor simply clicks on a key moment to scroll back through the scenario and replay it from several different points of view, says Brown. If, for example, a sniper opened fire on the team during the session, an instructor “can go to each person in your squad and see how they reacted to that,” says Mohr.

Capturing the psycho-physiological data can prove helpful in assessing an individual’s needs.

“We have a lot of variability in soldiers that come through. Some are superb at cross-cultural communication and adept at numerous social situations,” explains Deagle. “We would want to get an idea that they are, in fact, cruising through a scenario so that we could make the training a little bit harder, a little more challenging, for them.”

In contrast, a soldier who’s more introverted and has less of a skill set in the interpersonal arena may be overwhelmed by certain training scenarios.

Without such data, training tends to be one-size-fits-all, says Deagle. “That doesn’t work if you’re trying to optimize training for each individual soldier,” he says.

Unlike some forces that are looking at simulations as viable replacements for live exercises, the special warfare center and school is using the simulation to enrich its training. The simulation functions as more of a preparatory rehearsal for the live training exercise at the course’s conclusion, with role-players in scenarios that reflect actual operational and tactical settings.

“In our environment, we still think live training is best. But there are simply limitations in how much you can actually do,” says Deagle. More than 90 percent of the soldiers going through the courses are deploying within 90 days of graduating, he says.

“We have a fixed, limited pipeline timeline that we have to get folks out the door with, and we want to give them the best possible training experience they can have within that time,” he says.

The simulation is a way to capitalize on limited training time.

“In 15 or 20 minutes, I can have them immersed in the simulation, running around and training,” says Deagle. “Even with an extensive budget and unlimited access to funds, I can’t do that with actual role-players.”

In the future, Deagle says the school would like to give players real-time feedback of their psycho-physiological data so that they’re aware of their own personal states as they’re negotiating.

“When it comes to biofeedback and psycho-physiological measurements in general, soldiers and athletes respond very well if they’re given feedback … they can effectively moderate their responses in high-stress situations,” he says.

Brown says Virtual Heroes wants to be able to capture emotions from players and translate them into their avatars. Players in the current version of the simulation show frustration and anger by hitting the space bar on their keyboards.

In the future, it also may be possible to have the game itself respond to players’ physical states. Allowing a bridge to appear in the game only if a player approaches it in a calm state is only one of many options, he says.

Please email your comments to GJean@ndia.org

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