Toward Augmenting Army Aviation Collective Training with Game-based Environments
(Room S320E)
29 Nov 17
5:00 PM
-
5:30 PM
Maintaining the highest levels of training and readiness is an ongoing concern for today’s warfighters. A rapidly evolving threat landscape, ever-present fiscal concerns, and the move toward virtualization are driving the need for more efficient training methods. The U.S. Army is addressing this need by investigating the potential of game-based systems to augment traditional simulation-based aviation collective training. Game-based training is one component of the U.S. Army Aviation Combined Arms Training Strategy (2016), which highlights the use of Training Aids, Devices, Simulations, and Simulators (TADSS) as key, low-cost tools to prepare Army aviation forces for future combat. However, the effectiveness of game-based training requires further investigation, and its use as an adjunct to aviation collective training has not been adequately evaluated. The goal for the present study was to determine the potential for the low physical fidelity Virtual Battlespace 3 (VBS3) games-for-training system to augment aviation collective training conducted in the medium physical fidelity Aviation Combined Arms Tactical Trainer (AVCATT). Evaluation efforts focused on the cognitive fidelity of these training systems. Twenty-seven expert pilots participated in a realistic collective air assault mission scenario first in either the VBS3 or AVCATT training environment and then in a high fidelity Operational Flight Trainer (OFT) serving as a real world analog environment. Each environment was evaluated in terms of presence, simulation sickness, workload, performance, and HRV. The cognitive fidelity of the OFT corresponded more closely with the AVCATT than VBS3. Objective performance was comparable between the AVCATT and VBS3 and did not lead to performance differences in the OFT. This paper concludes by discussing potential ways to augment collective aviation training with lower fidelity game-based systems and by proposing design improvements for simulated collective training enviro