Immersive Situation Room Training
Summer 2010 : consultative investigation for employers client
Consultative sessions with a dutch company specialised in crisis management training. Looking for methods to enrich training for situation room teams by using new media options, among which virtual reality.
Case revolved round a chemical plant in asia, experiencing a flood. In a roleplay situation, the team under training would go through the process of dealign with the disasters impact and restoring normal operation at the plant. For this, The plant could be rebuilt in a virtual environment, and have the flood and effect being played out along a timeline, creating events and trusision for the team-in-training to deal with.
Result was a prototype of a eventsmanager that would allow a trainer to load, edit and run ‘disasters;, having the managementtool send out news at appointed times in the trainings timeline. The news could be pre-recorded voicemessages, emails to parts of or the whole team, start up video messages on a screen or electronically generated faxes.
Besides these ‘existing’ events, the managementtool would also trigger events in the in-world environment, causing the disaster to unfold in a visual manner too. Water could flood the plant and retract over time, Fires could start and builings could collapse.
