Virtual humans for interpersonal and communication skills' training in crime investigations

Konstantinos Mykoniatis

Anastasia Angelopoulou

Michael D. Proctor

Waldemar Karwowski

pp. 282-292

in: Randall Shumaker, Stéphanie Lackey (eds), Virtual, augmented and mixed reality. designing and developing virtual and augmented environments, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Virtual Humans (VHs) have been employed in multidisciplinary fields to advance interpersonal skills critical to many professional, including law enforcement agents, military personnel, managers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Law enforcement agencies in particular have faced a growing need to develop human to human interpersonal training to increase interviewing and interrogation skills. In this paper, we present a prototype VE that has been developed to provide law enforcement agents with effective interview and interrogation training and experiential learning. The virtual training environment will need to be tested and formally evaluated to verify the benefits compared to live exercises and traditional training techniques.