IEM’s Smarty Pantz Studios

IEM’s Smarty Pantz Studios—housed in South Jordan, Utah—develops science-based serious gaming technologies and network science applications for defeating terrorism networks. Equipped with the latest technologies and staffed by physicists, artificial intelligence experts, simulation specialists, artists, and veteran commercial gaming technologists, Smarty Pantz Studios creates highly realistic integrated models of social networks, terrorist behavior, crowd behavior, critical infrastructure, and more to help improve US ability to respond to and minimize terrorist threats.

Smarty Pantz productions are built from a powerful intersection of forces—an art department steeped in the tradition of realistic, site-specific textures; an agent-based AI engine combined with specially crafted databases to produce models of social networks and realistic crowd behavior; and an IEM-produced image generator that can handle large high-fidelity crowds of avatars at 30 frame/sec animation rates.

Learning to Identify the Tell-Tale Signs of Danger

IEM’s Smarty Pantz Studios created S.M.A.R.T. Warfighter™, a 3D virtual training platform that helps soldiers recognize and react to the signs of potential IED threats before they deploy to the field. Trainees observe and monitor a virtual marketplace street scene full of sights, sounds, and potential dangers that they may encounter in the field in Iraq or Afghanistan.

S.M.A.R.T. Warfighter’s crowd model allows avatars to seamlessly transition from walking in the crowd to performing the actions of a terrorist. The crowd reacts to elements introduced to the scene, such as gunfire, explosions, or a soldier’s escalation of force. The technology is completely scalable to a laptop PC or a distributed training environment for interactive play as a serious game, such as a combat driver training program.

Currently installed at Camp Pendleton’s Immersive Infantry Trainer as part of a mixed reality environment, S.M.A.R.T. Warfighter helps trainees learn to recognize and react to suspicious behaviors, becoming more educated in combat profiling, IED awareness, rules of engagement decision-making, and cause-and-effect situations, with the ultimate goal of saving lives and enhancing mission performance.

S.M.A.R.T Warfighter Developers' Commentary