The modern military operational environment is complex, filled with subtle physical, psychological, and sociocultural cues. Personnel must be able to rapidly perceive, understand, and then respond to a range of stimuli, from Improvised Explosive Devices and snipers to more nuanced indicators, such as the signs that point to an insurgent network. Our team is currently investigating training interventions that will enhance personnel's capacity to accurately perceive such cues. This training addresses sociocultural sensemaking, mental baseline creation, anomaly detection, and related communication skills.

To efficaciously support such training with simulation, the simulated stimuli must be accurately modeled. Beyond basic sensory realism (i.e., physical fidelity), trainees must be exposed to a coherent, connected stimulus flow. In other words, the simulated experience must produce a cohesive emergent pattern that transcends physical—and even task and psychological—fidelity; the simulation must produce an interpretable scheme that facilitates finely tuned perceptual training. To achieve this, we are translating approaches from "experiential design" to Modeling & Simulation (M&S). Experiential design is used to create strategically compelling and memorable experiences by systematically manipulating sensory, cognitive, affective, active, and relational factors. Although typically applied to physical, commercial settings (e.g., retail stores) some simulation researchers theorize that experiential design may also apply to virtual environments (e.g., Chertoff et al., 2010).

In this paper, we describe experiential design and demonstrate its applicability for simulated experiences. We present an operationalized breakdown of a "holistic experience" and then propose ten pragmatic guidelines, informed by experiential design best practices, for creating holistic experiences within simulation-based training environments. Experiential design is an emerging concept in simulation; the practitioner community is generally unfamiliar with this approach, yet it meaningfully transforms and extends academic discussions on fidelity and provides a novel framework that M&S practitioners can use to design and evaluate their human-in-the-loop systems. In other words, the concept of experiential design may help M&S practitioners make better use virtual training.