You hear a landlord call 911 to report that he thinks his tenants are making a bomb. He says he sees bags of fertilizer and symbols indicating radioactivity inside a trailer in an industrial park. You recognize the ingredients for a dirty bomb and head out. As you approach the trailer, you detect low levels of radiation. A crow caws, and ominous music swells in the background.

It looks like the latest hot video game, but this computer program is the work of local researchers developing virtual training for people who would respond to a terrorist attack. Called the Virtual Terrorism Response Academy, Dr. Joseph Henderson's lab at Dartmouth Medical School is conducting a test of the program with the Chicago Fire Department and expects the program to be done early next year.

The project is one of many ways researchers at Dartmouth College's Institute for Security Technology Studies, or ISTS, are trying to simulate the experience of a terrorist attack or other emergencies to better prepare for a real incident. With a focus on cyber security and emergency response technology, the institute draws from Dartmouth's medical and engineering schools as well as from the college's sociology and computer science departments, among others disciplines, and has leveraged its Dartmouth funding into $12 million more in competitive grants.

Henderson's lab was recently awarded a $3 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security to create a training program for medical professionals, called the Virtual Medical Incident Management Institute. The lab staff emphasized that this funding stems directly from affiliation with the ISTS. Many of the new program's tools will be the same as those in the terrorism response academy because they are both "advanced distance learning environments,"as their creators bill them.

"Times are changing, and we really do have to educate a lot of different people for functions they didn't have before," said Dr. Robert Gougelet, program director of the New England Center for Emergency Preparedness at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. When people consider taking a training course, they ask whether it's expensive, if it's targeted to them, how much time it would take and whether they have to travel, Gougelet said. "What the virtual training academy does is minimize those barriers," he said.

Andy Mitchell, director of the Office for Domestic Preparedness within the Department of Homeland Security, said one of the key conditions of Dartmouth's grant was the "capabilities to develop and conduct a national training program."

The Interactive Media Lab, in conjunction with the center Gougelet leads and TriMed, Inc., applied to the grant offering training in mass casualty care, which was one of the priorities when Mitchell's office awarded $30 million this fall for training initiatives. Mitchell's office reviewed 267 grant applications and funded 15; Dartmouth received the third most funding, behind Florida State University and George Washington University.

"There's a good technical infrastructure there (at Dartmouth),"Mitchell said. "We're quite confident this is going to provide us with a significantly enhanced capability to meet the training needs of our nation's first responders."

Translating pop games to training

The Virtual Terrorism Response Academy is a "first-person shooter" simulation, which means the player's on-screen view is that of the character, like in Quake II, the foundation for the virtual academy, or the Doom series. Trainees enter the hallways of the virtual academy and select different classrooms to learn or review topics such as how to use various instruments and crime scene management.

Once the trainee demonstrates knowledge of hazardous materials, he or she receives a key to the Simulation Area, a suite of rooms where the trainee receives briefings and chooses equipment. Only then does the trainee get to try a range of 3-D simulations related to weapons of mass destruction, such as the dirty bomb scenario described earlier. Contemporary first-person shooter games center on aiming and shooting with various weapons, and the programmers of the Interactive Media Lab replaced the weapons options with instruments like a dosimeter, which measures exposure to radiation.

That this training program is fun is an advantage in itself because people will want to use it, said Joshua Nelson, administrative director of Henderson's lab. It is not designed to replace other preparation, but rather to prepare emergency workers for hands-on training and to provide people with a way to review their skills that's also entertaining. Sometimes people might learn how to use several instruments during the course of a week, "then you don't do it again for another six months," Nelson said.

"One of the advantages of having something like this - you can offer it anytime, anywhere," said Timothy Elliott, associate media producer in Henderson's Interactive Media Laboratory. It's expensive to send firefighters, police and medical personnel to training sites, especially when the majority of them nationally are volunteers, Elliott said.

These researchers have a similar goal with Virtual Medical Incident Management Institute, or V-MIMI, which they said would resemble the video games SimCity and Diablo. The virtual institute would provide planning and education for senior health care officials who would lead the response to incidents such as Hurricane Katrina or an avian flu pandemic, Elliott said. Trainees would have to visualize the response to emergencies, and would get to see the virtual outcomes of their decisions.

"All of us have to look at many more different things that we used to just a few years ago," Gougelet said. "The critical thing we need to adjust for is 'How do we prepare for mass casualty events?'"

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