Inspiration
Rescue Ready VR is a response to the devastating LA wildfires, where more than 30 people lost their lives. At least 3 people of the victims had a physical disability, and 8 of them were elderly citizens with limited mobility issues. The stories of the amputee father and son with cerebral palsy, who couldn't be evacuated in time, and the mother who had to leave behind her son with cerebral palsy, hit home for our team - as one of our team members has a child with CP as well.
1 in 4 Americans have a disability, yet disabled people are up to 4 times more likely to die in natural disasters. This is because our society doesn't value disabled folks enough to include them in planning for emergencies. There are over 2 million disabled residents of Los Angeles. In rebuilding our community and looking towards the future, we need to include disabled people in our emergency response planning, and develop a culture of readiness among our neighbors. YOU are the first "first responder" - so if you are Rescue Ready, you can save a life.
What it does
Our project, Rescue Ready VR, aims to raise awareness and share basic practices for communicating with and evacuating disabled individuals in an emergency. This prototype walks you through a simulation of a fire emergency while introducing general protocols for evacuating a wheelchair user - including asking if assistance is needed, assessing imminent danger, identifying nearest exits, accessing their mobility aids and medical devices, ensuring a clear path to travel, and notifying emergency personnel. Like with school fire drills, repetition, and practice is key to staying calm and being prepared for the worst. We want to raise a call to action for all users to learn how to pack an emergency kit, reach local accessible transportation, build plans with on-the-ground organizations, and more.
How we built it
Rescue Ready VR was built in Unity by our two developers, one on the ground here at ASU Local LA, and the other on the East Coast. We downloaded free, low-poly FBX assets to build our level and characters - our disabled neighbor, a phone sounding the evacuation alarm, a burning house with multiple exits, falling debris, a go bag, and an accessibility aid (wheelchair).
We created a checklist of the recommended protocol for communicating with and evacuating a wheelchair user and developed a linear narrative and script. Using this script, we recorded the voices of both the player and the disabled neighbor to enhance the immersiveness and urgency of the simulation. We used Adobe Audition and Elevenlabs for sound. Mixamo was also used to provide motion animation for the wheelchair user.
From a technical perspective, we used OpenXR and various C# scripts to implement all the functionality from start to finish. We used Quest devices to test our Android builds of the experience. We filmed the guide video on greenscreen, and used Adobe Premiere to edit it.
Challenges we ran into
1) Concept Development & Ethics
With the weight of the LA fires heavy on our minds, we brainstormed multiple ways and means of contributing and making an impact with our time and skillsets within and beyond the boundaries of the hackathon. Spirited discussions were had about the ethics of crowdfunding, the realities of , and whether even XR was a suitable medium for making a difference.
2) Choosing a Medium
There are too many mediums to use, such as AR. However, the reason why all team members agreed to use VR, is to make our experience as immersive as possible and to create a sense of emergency. The experience makes the user feel the tension they might feel in this hard situation. There were also challenges in understanding the gaming platform (Unity), and getting all the XR interactions to work correctly
3) Listening to real members of the disabled community and adapting their input
Our team has a personal connection to disability advocacy, as one of our members is the parent to a disabled child, who is also an artist and activist. We consulted his experience and feedback on how to best listen to and assist someone like him in a real emergency situation.
4) Hackathon Time Constraints
As designers, we are always ambitious about how we want the experience to be. The time constraints made us think about how we could narrow down our thoughts and set up priorities to achieve the goal of the piece. It was a great challenge to do everything in parallel and keep our communication as clear and live as possible.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud to be the first VR Fire Safety program aimed at helping civilians support their disabled peers. We chose to make it VR to create an immersive sense of urgency. In real life, people might freeze or not know how to act in an emergency, and they might be terrified or unprepared to help a disabled neighbor, despite wanting to. This experience would hopefully help make them comfortable enough to leap into action when needed. Most importantly, we’re proud to have consulted input and included on-screen representation from an actual wheelchair user and disability advocate in our community - special thanks to Vedanten Naidoo.
What we learned
It was an enriching experience for all of us, as we learned how to manage the time to prepare our project for testing. The whole process was a learning process, starting from brainstorming, passing by team creation, and getting comfortable working with strangers. It was a real challenge to narrow down our ideas so that they could be implemented in a short amount of time. Working directly with developers taught us about the limitations designers might have. It is always beneficial to understand more about how to work everything in parallel to reach the desired outcome. From a technical perspective, we learned more about what’s more feasible in a limited timeframe.
What's next for Rescue Ready VR
While Rescue Ready is not the first fire safety VR experience, it is the only one we've seen that includes disabled people - which further underlines how developers (and by extension, our society), don't include disabled folks in planning for emergencies. We hope to continue developing our program to include protocols for other at-risk groups, such as people who are hard of hearing, have low vision, cognitive disabilities, etc with the input and support of the community. We can create multiple levels that reflect different situations with different complicity levels (ex. How to act if the fire is downstairs?) In terms of accessibility, we want to make this program available on the browser as a webGL experience and also recorded as video walkthroughs for Youtube and other social platforms. This experience would be available on Meta Quest 2, Quest 3, Quest 3S & Quest Pro. Another option is to create volunteer teams to bring VR headsets to universities, offices, and local community organizations for people to experience it. Rescue Ready VR is not intended to replace actual training programs for first responders - instead, we aim to increase awareness and facilitate conversations, and normalize the inclusion of the disabled community in designing technology and new media spaces.
A journey through matrilineal memory and oral storytelling, the passing on and generational reinterpretation of the moon goddess of Chinese legend, Chang'e.
Original music and narration: Lucy Yao
Found footage shot and edited by Dyan Jong
Poem: “Lore” by Nancy Huang
Space footage provided by NASA
Submission for the Facebook SparkAR Hackathon
Collaboration of Aaron Santiago, Dyan Jong, Nick Gregg, Olivia Seow
Computer generated Dada set design in Unreal Engine.
Presented by This Is Not A Theater Company, Readymade Cabaret 2.0 is an interactive online theatre experience in which the audience chooses scenes by rolling dice.
Press Announcement | NY Times Review | Howlround Livestream | The Theatre Times
Melbourne Fringe Festival, Jairangam Theatre Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe Online
