Dr. Michael Young, deputy director of EAE and professor of computer science at University of Utah, and Dr. Mark van Langeveld, associate professor of EAE, have received a gift of $25,000 from Rockwell-Collins’s University/College Grants program in support of their research efforts around a project entitled “Developing Intelligent, Adaptive Systems for Personalized Training in Augmented Virtual Environments.”

The goal of the project is to create highly personalized types of intelligent training systems for virtual and augmented reality. With the advent of new augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies, the potential for training in these immersive environments is significant. Virtual and augmented reality alone, however, provide only the infrastructure supporting this potential. In order to produce AR/VR environments that automatically adapt to learners’ specific objectives, virtual environments must also interact with intelligent systems that coordinate environment behavior, configure challenges novel learning challenges, increase or decrease difficulty in response to observed task mastery and provide automated in-situ evaluation of a learner’s skills and capabilities. Young and van Langeveld are undertaking this effort to build an architecture that integrates existing AR/VR technology with novel architectures for intelligent game-based learning.