CLIENT
Vigiles: Instituto de Protección Civil is the leading firefighter training company in Madrid and the first professional training center approved by the Community of Madrid and the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training to teach intermediate and advanced degrees in civil protection and emergencies. More than 30 years of experience and more than 150,000 students trained guarantee its method and training quality.
GOAL ACHIEVED
Create a Virtual Reality Hyper-experience that recreates a real training applied to firefighter training, to be used in fairs and events and surprise the public.
Simulations of risk in Virtual Reality
In order to use Virtual Reality in its stand during the AULA 2020 fair and to attract a greater number of public to it, Vigiles: Civil Protection Institute placed its trust in DeuSens to recreate virtually a real practice of the training given in their courses of preparation and training of firefighters.
This is how we carried out this Hyperexperience which consisted of a simulation of a training for firefighters, which up to that moment was carried out in real life. We, however, set out to change the rules of the game and bring this practice to the virtual world, demonstrating that it could be feasible to implement it in the training of future firefighters, managing to avoid risks, saving time and costs and facilitating the preparation of the practice for more students.
Recreating firefighter training in VR
In constant contact and advised by the professionals of Vigiles: Civil Protection Institute, we carried out a faithful recreation of the real practice to train firefighters in Virtual Reality. The biggest fear for Vigiles: Instituto de Protección Civil was that it would not be a sufficiently immersive hyper-experience to provide users with those sensations of risk that would bring them closer to a real-world situation. To avoid this and achieve a realistic and immersive HyperExperience, the entire DeuSens team focused on recreating in the smallest detail the sensations that the firefighter captured in the real world to transfer them to the virtual world.
This is how, mainly, we focused on the two senses that can be stimulated by Virtual Reality: sight and hearing. In the visual section, technically, we deployed the best existing 3D modeling technology to achieve a very realistic resolution and animations, both of the place, as well as the firefighter's equipment, which had fireproof suit, helmet, hose and other tools. As for the sound section, the incorporation of realistic sound effects for the fire or the use of the hose, for example, was key to achieving a much more complete and accomplished immersion.
The use of Virtual Reality in training and learning
Examples such as this project carried out for Vigiles: Civil Protection Institute have shown in recent years, that Virtual Reality can be a technology applicable to the field of training and learning, especially of practical and manual processes, through which simulations can be performed to complement the theoretical knowledge acquired. In addition, it should be noted that it is a technology that avoids risks, accelerates the learning process, allows unlimited repetition of practice and all this saving costs, in many cases, time, infrastructure and also economic.
In this case, despite being a project made to take to fairs and events with the aim of attracting more attendance to the stand of Vigiles: Instituto de Protección Civil, could be applied in the training of future firefighters prepared to place them before a real situation in which they had to apply the knowledge previously acquired, using in the correct way the fireproof suit and the tools placed at their disposal with the aim of managing to contain the fire that was spreading in the forest. A real practice, which could be recreated and brought to the virtual world thanks to Virtual Reality technology.
