Tour of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies

A few months ago, I took a half-day tour at the University of Southern California’s astonishing Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). As a citizen, I set aside my view of current military engagements and allowed myself to be amazed at the leading-edge training that ICT is developing for our soldiers. As a learning professional in a company that prides itself on innovative use of technology in learning, I was blown away by a new glimpse at the art of the possible (given enough budget).

According to the tour, the idea for ICT was first raised by a woman named Anita Jones when she was the Director of Defense Research & Engineering at the Pentagon. She observed her son’s immersion in video games and wondered about the use of video games in training for the military. A few workshops, conferences, and publications followed, leading to the founding of ICT in 1999 through a contract with the U.S. Army. Its mission was to create synthetic experiences so compelling that participants would react as though the simulation was real. As the tour guide put it, “We were trying to create the holodeck from Star Trek.”

I learned on the tour that from the start, the human dimensions of simulation had priority. While other organizations were focused on functional simulations to develop the motor skills involved in driving a tank or flying an airplane, ICT was focused on simulations to develop skills in interpersonal interaction, critical-thinking and decision-making. The examples shown on our tour included examples of learning simulations for:
-Leadership 

-Cultural awareness
-Negotiation
-Post-traumatic stress disorder therapy 

ICT tackles these difficult challenges by teaming experts in learning, graphics, and computer science together with creative professionals from Hollywood and the videogame industry. Together their teams produce immersive, interactive media for learning and entertainment.

Projects generally start with a cognitive task analysis to understand the activities to be simulated. Subject matter experts describe detailed steps, including physical movements, environmental factors, mental activities such as judgment calls, assessments, or problem-solving, and emotional responses. Care is taken to surface not just the behaviors of actors in the simulation, but also their thinking and emotional processes. Many recent projects focus on soldiers working in the Middle East, so cultural components also receive due care.

With the focus on developing simulations to build skills in areas such as leadership and negotiation, the emotional content is particularly important. Compelling stories are a key way that emotional context and cultural content are included in the simulation experience. ICT uses “story nets” to convey a series of events over a sequence of turns. The story changes (within the limits of the simulation) depending on the learner’s actions and the responses of other parties in the simulation. So, for example, if the soldier using a negotiation simulation foregoes the opportunity to prepare and then, uninformed, takes an action that is disrespectful of the local culture, the tribal leader with whom he is negotiating might derail the conversation.

Non-verbal communication behavior by the avatars -  their gestures, facial expressions, and stance -  also has key importance in realistically conveying human emotion. ICT has advanced the state of the art in rendering avatars through innovations in lighting, photography, and skin scanning. Their advances have been used not only in simulations for the military, but also in Hollywood movies, for which they earned an Academy Award. Realistic avatars help learners become immersed in the simulation.

ICT sees itself as a research center, and so of course it undertakes a huge amount of R&D. This ranges from foundational research in the construction of virtual humans and learning simulations, to the development of enabling technologies such as the “virtual human toolkit” and the LAST method (learning with adaptive simulation and training), to a series of prototype applications.

According to a speaker on my tour, it considers all of its products to be prototypes. Clients don’t necessarily expect deployment, although many of the “prototypes” have been good enough to be widely fielded. During the tour, I saw excerpts from Bilat, which provides training and practice in cross-cultural negotiation, Urban Sim, which was the subject of a recent article in The Atlantic, and the Mobile Counter-IED Interactive Trainer, a blended learning solution delivered to soldiers in the housing of a shipping container which can be dropped at nearly any location.

In addition to conducting R&D to develop new prototypes, ICT also publishes studies about the impact of their innovations. They have found, for example, that the serious-game-based approach to teaching intercultural communication skills in ELECT BiLAT successfully led to learner’s mastery of cultural rules relating to meeting phases and the timing of communicative actions.

How much does all of this cost? In 2004, the Army awarded ICT $100million to continue its overall R&D work. The Mobile Counter-IED Interactive Trainer was the result of a $10million contract in 2009. 

Clearly, the military’s need for state-of-the-art training tools stands to benefit the videogaming industry and its customers who are willing to pay for ever-more-realistic scenarios.

My work involves accelerating the development of corporate leaders. How can we apply the insights and technology developed by ICT? We’ve got enough scale (almost 35,000 first-line managers). If we invested $250 per manager in annual leadership vitality education, that would be $8.75million…more than enough to produce something really compelling. It is possible that one solution, even one with a lot of story nets, meet our needs globally? These are conversations worth having.