Simulation Interoperability with a Commercial Game Engine

The interest in game engines as platforms for serious simulation has increased dramatically over the past few years. Game engines have made great advances in user interaction and visualization at low cost that have exceeded advances within the simulation community. With few exceptions, though, the early efforts to use entertainment-based games for non-entertainment applications have been focused on creating "serious games." Open standards for distributed simulations like HLA and DIS have been largely ignored by the game community. If games engines are to be genuinely useful to the simulation community, they must be interoperable with existing simulations. The Gamebots interface, originally developed for AI researchers to experiment with game environments, can also be used to facilitate simulation interoperability. We have modified the Gamebots interface to allow external simulations to control the state of internal game objects. The context of our first usage is a mass casualty simulation called Unreal Triage, in which physiological vital signs, such as pulse and respiration, of disaster victims being monitored with wireless physiological sensors are driven by an external biomedical simulation.