IRIT - Emergency Management & Leadership


The Application

IRIT, the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, is a French research facility funded in part by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse (INPT), the Université Paul Sabatier (UPS) and the Université des Sciences Sociales Toulouse 1 (UT1).
IRIT developed for Essone district’s Institut Médecine Navale du Service de Santé des Armées (IMNSSA) training applications for future fire fighters. Its goal is to create a virtual collaborative environment that trains a team of fire fighters to perform command operations under harsh but realistic conditions.


The Challenge

To provide firemen with valuable leadership and crisis management experience, these Emergency Response applications needed to realistically simulate human behavior (gestures and emotions), as well as be able to visually represent mission accomplishment. To create this application, IRIT needed to find cutting edge software with an open architecture to develop these interactive scenarios.

The application needed to have modular components for each particular training task and necessitated an interface that would allow intuitive navigation in 3D space, as well as motion capture. The application was broken down into components to first test the feasibility with the following specific criteria:

• Behavioral simulations capable of reproducing gestures and emotional expressions.
• Possibility of coherently grouping an intentional gesture with an unintentional one like a head movement.
• Mocking up the rules of social behavior in situ.

The Solution

Virtools Dev was chose for its open architecture that allowed them to quickly mock up the application modules:

• A dialogue module between several avatars. This modules manages the conversational rules between the avatars and allows for accompanying gestures (head, eyes, hands, etc.) to be automatically added to the discussion.
• An Emotion module that determines in real time the emotional state of the avatars based on environmental factors and session proceedings. As a result, avatars can automatically change the way that a character moves and acts (i.e. more nervous, more direct, etc.) It is also possible to assign a personality to each avatar that the animations will take into account.

Thanks to Virtools Dev’s ease of use, the training applications were created with a small development team:

• Novice Dev scripters
• A human factor expert to study the scenarios in use.
• A cognitive scientist for the specifications of the avatar’s artificial intelligence, object libraries and scenarios.
• A designer for building the 3D models
• A project manager

The various projects were validated by various professionals to ensure the validity of the projects and scenarios and evaluate their success.
Dev’s trademark behavior building blocks library, containing 450 ready to use behaviors, allowed the development team to easily build their applications. Dev’s intuitive user interface, especially its graphic programming and editable parameters, allowed non-programmers to quickly build complex, highly detailed scenarios.

Key Benefits

• Accessible and intuitive graphical user interface, complete with 450 behavior building blocks.
• Powerful render and behavioral engines.
• Impressive immersive power.
• Open architecture that facilitates collaborative work environment