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The US Navy's @AllHandsMag writes about a unique use of VBS3 for training.

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The US Navy's @AllHandsMag writes about a unique use of VBS3 for training.





http://www.navy.mil/ah_online/ftrStory.asp?issue=3&id=87658&cid=social_20150616_47614836&adbid=610899678821875712&adbpl=tw&adbpr=1691708977

Says Moses, "ONR [The Office of Naval Research] wanted a way for the human to train with a dog, with a virtual dog, that you can train with anytime, anywhere."

What looks like a video game is actually a training tool widely used by the U.S. Army, called Virtual Battlespace. After a lot of research into dog behavior, including watching 100s of hours of tapes of handlers and their dogs in Iraq, Moses worked with others to create ROVER. ROVER is a distinct module that employs Virtual Battlespace and helps handlers practice commands and learning to read the dog's silent cues.

"Gestures are important, the whistle commands are important, even the voice commands are important," says Moses. He wrote what he calls a skeleton tracker program for ROVER, so the Xbox camera can "see" a player's gestures.

"There's a lot of stuff going on in the background," he says. "Our challenge was not only doing the plume part of it, which is actually the easier part. The harder part was, how do you account for dog psychology?"

Says Lisa Albuquerque, the former ONR Program Manager, "This collaborative effort between ONR and NRL demonstrates [...] our ability to provide multi-disciplinary solutions to warfighter-identified problems. Use of IEDs will persist, and efforts such as this will help our nation to be ready to respond."

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