Emergency response teams must stay calm and follow strict protocols, even under the most stressful situations. But how can they prepare for the pressure of real-life disasters without putting themselves or others at risk? Here is where XRisis comes in. As one of the winners of our first Open Call, this project uses extended reality (XR) to create immersive, repeatable, and collaborative training simulations for first responders. By combining XR with real-time communication tools, XRisis equips humanitarian teams with the confidence and skills they need before facing a real emergency.
Continue reading to discover how XRisis is improving training for crisis management with XR technologies.
Q: How would you describe XRisis in one sentence?
A: Situational awareness training for emergency first responders, exploiting immersive technologies.
Q: What problem are you solving? What makes your solution unique?
A: When faced with emergency and crisis situations, the ability to follow protocols calmly, while under extreme stress, is paramount, and crisis response teams undergo intensive training and continuous upskilling to help cope and respond in a calm and professional manner. Additionally, it is difficult to replicate an emergency or humanitarian crisis in the real world, as this requires significant time and resources. Conventional methods for training and upskilling can be costly, inefficient and logistically challenging.
XRisis addresses these challenges by leveraging the real-time collaborative communication functionality provided by the CORTEX2 platform to create inclusive, engaging, and easily repeatable simulated virtual crisis environments, without the associated dangers of the real world.
Q: What are XRisis’s main objectives?
A:
- Design a virtual simulation environment for emergency and crisis management training and upskilling that exploits the real-time collaborative functionalities provided by the CORTEX2 communications platform and third-party enabler services, through a mix of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and/or mixed reality (MR).
- Specify, implement and deploy an MVP of this design, using three exemplar pilots that showcase the potential added value of real-time collaborative immersive technologies as an innovator in realising emergency and crisis management response simulation, planning, training, and upskilling.
- Using ACF’s existing Quality Standards – CHS (Core Humanitarian Standards) and MEAL framework 1 (Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning) – a comprehensive validation of the MVP’s efficacy will be performed, as benchmarked against measurable KPIs.
- Promote the results of the MVP validation with other emergency and crisis response agencies as an advancement of the current State of the Art (SotA), by adopting it as a future standard simulation, planning, training, and upskilling procedure.
CORTEX2 support programme progress
Q: What have you achieved so far?
A:
- Requirements generated for the three user Pilots.
- Integration nearly complete with the key CORTEX2 enabler technologies.
- Pilot front-end nearly complete.
- Preparation started for deployment of three Pilots to user validation.
Q: How is participating in CORTEX2 supporting XRisis?
A: Being able to explore the value of CORTEX2 immersive enabling technologies against the three Pilots with our lead user, ACF.
Q: What are your next steps within the programme?
A: We are preparing the deployment of our three pilots, against which we will evaluate the value added of the CORTEX2 enabling technologies.
Learn more about XRisis and stay updated on its progress!
Want to explore more XR innovation? Browse all our supported projects on the CORTEX2 website: