Visualizing Afghan Culture in a Virtual Village for Training Cultural Awareness in Military Settings

Training and visualizing operational culture is important since understanding culture is a significant aspect of mission planning and execution. Serious games and 3D simulations provide efficient training and battlefield visualization in a safe and relatively inexpensive immersive environment. The research presented in this paper was initiated by the CAMO project (Cultural Awareness in Military Operations). The goal of the project was to create a low-cost simulation in the 3D virtual world of Second Life for pre-deployment cultural awareness training among Norwegian military personnel preparing for service in Afghanistan. In this paper, we focus on the role of crowd simulations and virtual humans for visualizing Afghan culture for training purposes, also in a civilian context.