Project description
Citizen-centred disaster preparedness
In case of a disaster, 'plan A' is that first responders arrive and save everyone. Until then, everyone needs a 'plan B'. Despite existing learning materials and disaster alert apps available to the public, neither those solutions nor traditional information campaigns significantly increased citizen preparedness, and live drills are extremely expensive. The EU-funded B-prepared project aims to teach disaster survival skills to European citizens. To that end, it will create a collaborative co-creation platform to collect learning materials, formulate curricula, perform cross-platform learning progress tracking, and deliver the learning content using virtual reality and gamification via the medium of a mobile app. The platform is open for content and game developers, projects, and other stakeholders via application programming interfaces.
Objective
Recent disaster events, like the 2021 flood in Germany showed clearly, that even the best alert systems and top first responder organisations can not prevent fatalities and serious damage on property without having prepared the citizens how to act and react during disaster situations and crises, understand alerts and follow instructions. B-Prepared offers a cost-effective solution for building a culture of disaster preparedness with a multi-actor approach in realistic historical scenarios. B-prepared builds on a freely accessible massive collaborative knowledge base and data hub, demonstrating its usefulness via three demonstrator applications: a cooperative multiplayer VR serious game, simulating real disaster scenarios for the safest near-real experience; an interactive gamified mobile app with age-appropriate content and enhanced accessibility to people with specific functional needs for the widest possible reach; and an LMS system to effectively and comparably measure preparedness levels achieved by VR and/or mobile users on a unified scale. Players can take different roles to solve puzzle tasks in an immersive experience. Teamplay, collaboration and communication are keys to survival, strengthening the culture of mutual assistance and cooperation in danger.
Player behaviour and gameplay logged in a privacy-preserving way helps collect data on in-game behaviour which serves assessment of preparedness but will also be shared with other synergic research in the same field. A large-scale virtual reality hackathon series will demonstrate its features. The open beta will be publicly available as a giveaway, inviting stakeholders via direct outreach. After closing beta, the game will be available in a non-profit freemium model where in-game purchases are replaced by in-game donations for relief organizations, with a small percentage kept for maintenance and further development.
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HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
1111 Budapest
Hungary