The components of the MediSim system were presented in the previous section. The system currently consists of two simulated individuals: an injured soldier with battlefield or situation appropriate wounds, and a simulated medical corpsman who can assess and manage the casualty. There may be other individuals in the simulation, but they are not participants in the medical encounter supported by MediSim. (In the future, additional individuals will be supported as participants.)
The corpsman may either be a semi-autonomous medic ( SAM) or else an intentionally correlated embodiment ( avatar) of a real participant's actions and commands. For the real corpsman participant, the avatar will conform to input behaviors in carrying out navigation, and on verbal command will execute various behaviors to carry out assessment, management, and evacuation. The participant is both observer and trainee, making decisions and giving commands to guide the physically capable, obedient, but passive avatar. Quantitative evaluation measures will be examined to gauge the efficacy of virtual training environments for medical personnel.
The casualty displays signs and behavioral manifestations of battlefield injury, for purposes of corpsman training. Physiological state information is available by visual inspection, in response to queries or performance of an assessment procedure. In a training activity, the casualty's wounds and injuries as well as his response to medical procedures can be probabilistically simulated -- or controlled by a ``behind the scenes'' or ``stealth'' instructor analogous to the experienced human trainer creating emergency situations for pilots during flight simulation.
Here we describe a prototype real-time implementation of MediSim, the modular networked implementation of MediSim currently under development, a VE embedding of MediSim, and MediSim's connection with DIS.