Assessing and Enhancing Team Training Technologies: From the Lab to the Field

Abstract

The primary goal of any training system is to enhance performance on the real world tasks it simulates (Lathan et al., 2002). The principal benefit that Virtual Environment (VE) systems have over field exercises and similar real world training is that VEs present training situations that would be too hazardous or too costly to reproduce in the real world (Rose, Attree, Brooks, Parslow, Penn & Ambihaipahan, 2000). As compared with Legacy type systems or physical mockups VEs also afford a smaller footprint and greater reconfigurability to support a variety of training tasks (Cohn, Helmick, Meyers & Burns, 2000). An additional, relatively unexplored benefit of VE, is the potential ease with which they can be implemented to train team tasks. This panel will investigate the utility of using VE for team training, addressing both theoretical and practical concerns.