A Culturally-enhanced Environmental Framework for Virtual Environments

This paper details the design and implementation of an embedded environmental framework that introduces cultural and social influences into a simulation agent’s decision-making process. We describe the current limitations associated with accurately representing culture in virtual environments and military simulations, and how recent research in other academic fields have enabled computational techniques to begin incorporating the effects of culture into AI and behavior subsystems. The technical approach is presented that describes the design and implementation of a hierarchical data model, as well as the software techniques for embedding culturally-specific information inside of a virtual environment. Finally, future work is discussed for developing a more comprehensive and standardized approach for embedding this culturally-specific information inside of the virtual domain.