Integrating biocybernetic adaptation in virtual reality training concentration and calmness in target shooting

Abstract

Training military readiness can significantly reduce potentially avoidable mistakes in real life situations. Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely used to provide a controlled and immersive medium for training both trainees’ physical and cognitive skills. Despite the tremendous advances in VR-based training for military personnel, the attention has been mainly paid on improving simulation’s realism through hardware tools and enhancing graphics and data input paradigms, rather than augmenting the human-computer interaction. Biocybernetic adaptation is a technique from the physiological computing field that allows creating real-time modulations based on detected human states indicated by psychophysiological responses. Although very sophisticated, the creation of biocybernetic loops has been mainly confined to research laboratories and very complex and invasive setups. Moreover, the combination of VR applications and biocybernetic adaptation has rarely been pursued beyond exploratory experiments. The Biocyber Physical System (BioPhyS) for military training in VR constitutes the first fully integrated, distributed and replicable VR simulator that is biocybernetically modulated. BioPhyS uses neurophysiological and cardiovascular measurements recorded from wearable sensors to detect calmness and cognitive readiness states to create dynamic changes in a VR target shooting simulator. The design process, psychophysiological modeling, and biocybernetic loop technology integration are shown, describing a pilot study carried out with a group of non-military participants. We highlight the software elements used for the VR-biocybernetic integration, and the psychophysiological model created for the real-time system as well as the timeline used to develop the functional prototype. We conclude this paper with a set of guidelines for developing meaningful physiological adaptations in VR applications.