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until they are ready to practice in a simulated scenario such as those seen in Figs. 1
and 2.
Once the course has been developed and fielded, we evaluate trainee performance
in the course and seek feedback from learners who have tried to apply what they
learned in real-life intercultural interactions. This results in an iterative process, in
which experience in the field results in revisions to the situational contexts, cultural
factors, and detailed learning objectives of the course.
5 Cultural Modeling Technologies
Immersive simulation technologies, together with other supporting technologies, play
critical roles in developing and implementing these courses. Knowledge management
tools are being developed to capture and organize the cultural knowledge. Authoring
tools have been developed to help authors create interactive lessons and activities for
teaching cultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Immersive simulation technologies,
incorporating intelligent agents, are used to simulate culturally appropriate behavior
and assess the learners' ability to behave in culturally appropriate ways.
These technologies come together in the conversational agent architecture used in
Alelo courses to generate the behavior of the non-player characters in the simulated
scenarios. Fig. 5 gives an overview of the agent architecture common to the learning
environments described here, and its interaction with the learners and the immersive
game environment. Further details are available in [4]. The most fully developed
implementation of this architecture is in the Virtual Role-Player (VRP) system, a
system that enables trainers to populate immersive environments with artificially
Fig. 5.
Conversational agent architecture
