ABSTRACT
Practice makes perfect. The military has long known the value of practicing skills and missions prior to their execution. Counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq placed a new emphasis on the development and practice of social skills. New tactics emphasize a focus on protecting the population and developing partnerships with the local population. From an engineering perspective, interactive virtual humans require the integration of advanced capabilities from a number of domains of computer science research including machine perception, artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, graphics, and animation. While virtual human technology may not be able to duplicate a real human role-player in all aspects of human behavior, cognition, and language, there have been advances that have made the development of training applications possible.
