Traditionally emergency procedure training involves the use of dioramas to illustrate what needs to happen. Using physical models of a place helps students picture what it would be like to actually be in the situation itself. Recently a project was demonstrated at a congressional meeting in Washington DC that may change the way this is all done.
A project from Idaho State University has moved this training into the virtual world of Second Life under a program called Play2Train. The hope is that students will find the experience more engaging and interactive. The implementation spans the two sims of Asterix and Obelix and contains a virtual town and a virtual hospital. Training sessions have already been underway for "Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and Response". Below is a 16 minute video by Ramesh Ramloll to illustrate:
This isn't the first time virtual worlds have been used for emergency training, of course. Forterra Systems, more famously the technology company behind There.com, have made formal military training one of their primary focuses for a few years. The high price of this effort, however, has put it beyond the budget of all but the US military. This is where Play2Train comes in. Flexible and available on a reasonable budget, it has so far been used by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Advanced Distance Learning Education(CADE) with many more interested parties on the way.
It's a completely great phenomenon that virtual worlds are being used for emergency preparedness, and I appreciate your mention of Forterra. In fact, Forterra has been developing and testing with users a comprehensive emergency response solution to mass-casualty events which addresses a wide range of situations, entirely separate from our military or enterprise or entertainment applications (we service many industries beyond military!). It seems pretty clear to us that virtual worlds represent one of the only possible solutions for large-scale practicing of disaster response without actually doing live rehearsals.
An example of the emergency training work we've been doing with Stanford University's Medical Media & Information Technologies (SUMMIT) group can be viewed at this URL
http://summit.stanford.edu/research/VEDII.html
Your comment about price does not address the equally vital question about value. Before you conclude from your uncited sources that Forterra's solutions are "beyond the budget of anyone but the US military" it might be worth your exploring what exactly it is that Forterra is offering relative to other solutions. We offer several variations of licensing packages as well as very affordable subscription packages. I am happy to share this with anyone interested (cbadger@forterrainc.com). Such features as the ability to run private virtual worlds in secure environments and behind firewalls, reliable performance, conducting classified exercises, HIPPA compliance for medical-related aspects of emergency response, the integration of accurate physiology models, distributed replay and other learning assessment tools, and the development of validated curriculum specifically targeted to emergency responders are all essential components of a robust and effective training and rehearsal system. Forterra offers all of this, and much more.
We have many customers and developers who have experimented in Second Life, then come to Forterra to deploy a real solution for the above reasons.
Chris Badger, VP Marketing, Forterra Systems
"Your comment about price does not address the equally vital question about value." In response to Chris's comment. Since I am behind the play2train effort, I think am in a good position to respond. 1. SL levels the playing field: otherwise, you would not see a Ivy League institution research being compared to ours :) so, if you dont have too much research funds, cannot afford to pay for a dedicated virtual world creation team, get started with SL :)), join the hundred of universities already doing this. 2. SL allows instructors to create their own virtual environments, which tightens the loop for course modification and redesign (I have no experience creating virtual worlds, yet I could build a little town in about 50 hours, and my intern built a hospital in about the same time) 3. SL allowed us to meet a large community of emergency preparedness folks within the SL itself and many sub projects grew from that interaction 4. I lead pretty much all our IT infrastructure and we found that the move to hosted solutions is much more effective, cheap and secure. So we use hosted webconferencing solutions and we are soon going to move to hosted gmail, we use hosted wiki solutions, e.g. social text and we believe that we will use SL in that mode too because we have only one or two staff to maintain all that resource. Plenty of articles out there talking about the myth of security and inhouse solutions, not the place for me to discuss this in here. 5. We found that effective emergency preparedness is not a 'secret affair'. Many aspects of emergency preparedness that we teach deal with courses that are in the public domain. Not surprising that most of the worthwhile preparedness efforts are grass root informed and are about self-preparedness (check out for e.g. flu preparedness -flu wiki). 6. We are satisfied with the level of security that SL affords for our training needs, and are happy with the access it provides to our partners across state borders, and we are in a special position to practice various interoperability issues at the communication level. 7. HIPPA is an interesting card that is played and I know that game well. It is used for e.g. when people try to pitch expensive teleconferencing platforms against cheaper ones using open source encryption...etc..and companies like Tandberg, Polycom and so forth like to push this "HIPPA" compliance aspect. Whatever works for marketing I guess, but I hope that folks realize that there are cheaper alternatives out there that does not compromise data security and privacy.
Bottom line, SL levels the playing field, and allows you to do things now. And keep in mind, once you think you have prototyped enough..and want to move to Forterra...well you are free to try. BE THE JUDGE. That's all the time I have for this post.
Dear Mr. Chris Badger
I would like to have more information about this product and the possibility to use in teaching my Nursing Students to practice the different Nursing Skills and feels the real life hands on Experience.
Thank you for any information that you will share with me regarding this technology.
Best regards
Dr. Hayudini
Dr. Hayudini,
We'd be happy to share information with you; the easiest and most efficient way to do that is to go to http://www.forterrainc.com/contact.php and send an inquiry that way.
Robert Gehorsam
President
Forterra Systems Inc.
Dear Mr. Robert Gehorsam
President
Forterra Systems Inc.
Thank you for your quick reply with regards to the Use of Second life environment to teach Nursing Skills.
Please note that I already send my formal enquiry using the link you provided .
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thank you
Dr. Hayudini
Training, or teaching will ever equal the explosive success power of passionate leadership! I know a lot of well-educated, well-intentioned folks who know the mechanics of this business — all the right...
Dear Dr. Hayudini:
Believe it or not, we have created our own virtual world medical training space on SecondLife. My company MJM Creative Services have developed live doctor and health professional simulations (which are themselves artifical intelligence-based avatars) that allow users to practice training and even score themselves. I would be delighted to provide you with a demonstration if you are interested. Feel free to email me for more information.
Yancey Hall
Director, MJM Interactive