ven though America’s Army has left the Naval Postgraduate School’s MOVES institute, other work using “avatars” continues.

One direct result of America’s Army is the  Language and Culture Familiarization Program, a local collaboration. When the game was released in July 2002, Luba Grant, a dean at Monterey’s Defense Language Institute, read about it in the newspaper. It sparked an idea she shared with her husband, Richard Donovan, an administrator at CSU Monterey Bay.

Grant came to the United States from Poland in 1964, and in 1972 she was teaching Russian at the DLI. Now the Dean of the Asian language school that teaches Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog and Vietnamese to military linguists, she saw America’s Army and thought to herself, “These soldiers need to speak a foreign language.”

Lucky for Grant, Donovan knows some of the researchers at MOVES. Last year, Grant teamed up Jeff Weekley from MOVES, a former Navy cryptolinguist trained in Korean at the DLI who now calls himself “probably the most prolific X3D [three-dimensional] modeler on the planet.” He got on the DLI language prototype team at the flat-hierarchy MOVES Institute because, as he says, he “just walked in on that meeting.”

Using an avatar format similar to the one in America’s Army, Weekley, Grant and others from a Florida-based tech outfit teamed up to create an interactive language instruction program that trains soldiers to react not only to dialogue in Arabic, for example, but also to pick up culturally-accurate body language cues.

“What we’ve created since last year is a small prototype, six or seven minutes long,” Grant says. “It’s a family coming back to Baghdad being stopped at a roadblock by American soldiers.”

In the prototype, the player has to react to choices presented onscreen. In collecting identification cards from the virtual Iraqi family, approaching a female instead of the male leader will lead the gamer into trouble. An avatar “mentor” corrects and guides players through the exercise.

Grant would like to develop the prototype into a game-format for a changing style of language instruction that moves away from rote learning of declensions and conjugation, and toward immersion and cultural sensitivity.

“We’re breaking new ground because right now it’s not being used,” she says. “The possibilities are without any limits and for one, it’s just very interesting, the idea to bring something like this into the classroom.”

Weekley says that greater cultural training throughout the armed forces can avert disaster. He refers specifically to the international embarrassment caused by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

As such programs evolve, there would be adaptations not only for the military, but also for business travelers who, for instance, need to bone up on Japanese customs before a trip to Tokyo.

“These cultural skills are not [just] nice things to have,” he says. “They are mission-critical. Done right, like America’s Army, it can be fun, and when training is fun, people volunteer for it. I’m an advocate for making things fun.”

Standing beside the prototype of the language simulator at the MOVES Institute recently, Weekley says, “This is the future.”