Training firefighters is a difficult process in which emotions and nonverbal behaviors play an important role. The authors have developed a mixed reality environment for training a small group of firefighters, which takes into account these aspects. The assessment of the environment was made up of three phases: assessing the virtual agents to gauge their expressiveness, assessing the contextual virtual environment to see if it provides the same decision-making support as that found in the real world, and verifying indexicality to support agent interaction.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2.
El Jed, M., Pallamin, N., Dugdale, J., & Pavard, B. (2004, March 29-April 1). Modelling character emotion in an interactive virtual environment. Proceedings of the AISB 2004 Symposium: Motion, Emotion and Cognition, Leeds, UK.
3.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
4.
Gratch, J., & Mao, M. (2003). Automating after action review: Attributing blame or credit in team training. Proceedings of Simtec T, Workshop on Behaviour Representation in Modelling and Simulation, Australia.
5.
Gratch, J., & Marsella, S. (2001, June). Tears and fears: Modeling emotions and emotional behaviors in synthetic agents. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, Canada.
6.
Kaufman, D., & Bell, W. (1997). Teaching and assessing clinical skills using virtual reality. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 39, 467-472.
7.
Klabbers, J. H. G. (2003). Gaming & simulation: Principles of a science of design. Simulation & Gaming, 34(4), 569-591.
8.
Klabbers, J. H. G. (2004). On cross-fertilization: A tale for two JASAG gaming communities. Studies in Simulation & Gaming, 14(1), 28-37.
9.
Klabbers, J. H. G. (2006). A framework for artifact assessment and theory testing. Simulation & Gaming, 37, 155-173.
10.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1990). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
11.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
12.
Pavard, B., & Dugdale, J. (2000). An introduction to complexity in social science. Retrieved from http://www.irit.fr/COSI/training/complexity-tutorial/complexity-tutorial.htm
13.
Rickel, J., Marsella, S., Gratch, J., Hill, R., Traum, D., & Swartout, B. (2002, July/August). Towards a new generation of virtual humans for interactive experiences. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17(4), 32-38.
14.
Rogers, W. T. (1978). The contribution of kinesic illustrators toward the comprehension of verbal behaviour within utterances. Human Communication Research, 5, 54-62.
15.
Stansfield, S., Shawver, D., Sobel, A., Prasad, M., & Tapia, L. (2000). Design and implementation of a virtual reality system and its application to training medical first responders. Presence, 9, 524-556.
16.
Tate, D., Silbert, L., & King, T. (1997). Virtual environments for shipboard firefighting training. In Proceedings of the IEEE 1997 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (pp. 61-68, 215). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press.
17.
Thompson, L. A., & Massaro, D. W. (1986). Evaluation and integration of speech and pointing gestures during referential understanding. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 42, 144-168.
18.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.