Let us consider the presentation by computers of rich, highly interactive worlds that are inhabited by dynamic and complex characters, and shaped by aesthetically pleasing stories. We shall call this interactive drama, and we believe that it requires strong characters, aesthetic presentation, and long-term dramatic structure. This paper describes an experiment designed to help us understand how to create interactive drama. Three principal questions are addressed. One, how does it feel to be immersed in a dramatic virtual world filled with characters and story? Two, what is required of the characters (actors) in such a virtual world? Three, what is required of the story and its director? We present an introduction to interactive drama, summarize the Oz system designed to create and present such experiences, and describe our experiment in detail. Finally, drawing from the experiment, we suggest several hypotheses about interactive drama.
The U.S. military medical community spends a great deal of time and resources training its personnel to provide them with the knowledge and skills necessary to perform life-saving tasks, both on the battlefield and at home. However, personnel may fail to retain specialized knowledge and skills if they are not applied during the typical periods of nonuse within the military deployment cycle, and retention of critical knowledge and skills is crucial to the successful care of warfighters. For example, we researched the skill and knowledge loss associated with specialized surgical skills such as those required to perform laparoscopic surgery (LS) procedures. These skills are subject to decay when military surgeons perform combat casualty care during their deployment instead of LS. This article describes our preliminary research identifying critical LS skills, as well as their acquisition and decay rates. It introduces models that identify critical skills related to laparoscopy, and proposes objective metrics for measuring these critical skills. This research will provide insight into best practices for (1) training skills that are durable and resistant to skill decay, (2) assessing these skills over time, and (3) introducing effective refresher training at appropriate intervals to maintain skill proficiency.
We describe an innovative system for authoring expressive, fully autonomous interactive characters. The focus of our work is creating a system to allow rich authoring that captures as much of the artistic intent of the author in procedural form as we can, and that provides automatic support for expressive execution of that content. The system is composed of two parts: (1) a programming language with unusual language features including concurrency, reflection, backtracking, continuously monitored expressions, and a model of emotion, that was created for the expression of interactive self-animating characters; and (2) a motion synthesis system that combines hand-animated motion data with artistically authored procedures for generalizing the motion while preserving the artistic intent. This system has been used to create over a dozen interactive characters, which have been shown at juried venues, as well as being deployed commercially. We describe how artistic qualities important to interactive characters are encoded and supported using this system, and demonstrate the system with an implemented interactive character.
Medical team training (MTT) conducted in a virtual environment fosters growth in cognitive, technical, and clinical aptitudes while offering advantages of flexibility, cost, and ease of scheduling over traditional high- fidelity simulations. Growing technology facilitates innovations to improve the ability to emulate roles, rules, resources, and fidelity. Our objective was to evaluate elements of key features that inform technical specifications for virtual simulations. A narrative review included 27 articles as relevant to elaborate on five key features identified as critical to development of virtual environments for MTT: automated assessment, task fidelity, interface modality, virtual teammates, and adaptability. Designers continue to improve the technology of virtual reality to create better and more enhanced training modules. We must better understand how variances in simulation features impacts performance outcomes and learned behavior. Future research can more deeply examine features beyond the five reviewed here to guide development of effective, cost-efficient virtual simulations for MTT.
Even though laparoscopic surgery has become the preferred technique for many surgeons, the methods of training are not standardized. Most simulators and training programs focus on training technical skills, neglecting very important non-technical skills. This study examined the benefits of different strategies of training both technical and non-technical skills amongst different experience levels. Twenty-seven subjects participated in the study (9 novices, 9 intermediate experience level subjects, and 9 advanced subjects). They were divided into 3 groups: technical, non-technical, and combined. Subjects practiced a purely technical, purely non-technical, and a combined technical and non-technical simulated surgical task. Data from pre-test and post-test scores as well as the last training block of combined training were analyzed for time to completion, number of technical errors and number of non-technical errors. Results suggest that there may be a benefit to training non-technical skills alone first, or in conjunction with technical surgical skills in novices during the beginning phases of learning. METHODS Subjects. Twenty-seven subjects were recruited into 3 different groups: Novices, Intermediates, and Advanced, with 9 subjects in each group. The Novices consisted of Wright State University engineering students who had no previous medical or surgical experience. The Intermediates consisted of
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