The age of global terrorism has cities thinking about emergency preparedness and training for first responders and others, but mounting real-life drills for mass dispensing of medications, triage, drive-through vaccination clinics, hospital evacuations, and other activities related to preparedness training require street closings, thousands of people, emergency vehicles, and millions of dollars in expense. Mass confusion often stymies the process.
According to Kevin Harvey (aka Qwerty Hansen in Second Life), assistant director of development for Chicago’s Center for the Advancement of Distance Education (CADE), School of Public Health, University of Illinois, mobilization drills in the virtual world aren’t so difficult, and organizers maintain control.
CADE is a technology solutions research and development group funded by grants and government contracts from the city of Chicago and public health entities. In Second Life, it built Public Health Preparedness Island (actually a series of seven islands) that’s used for emergency scenarios like pandemic influenza outbreaks, bio-terrorism and dirty bombs. CADE also has business clients such as BP, for whom they developed an ethics counseling prototype in Second Life. Employees would visit the site to report anonymously on ethical issues to upper management.
“You can’t do a dirty bomb drill at O’Hare, but you can build a virtual airport and do it online,” he says.
But is that truly effective?
“I’ve observed an actual drill and dispensing exercise, and I’ve facilitated a virtual drill,” Harvey points out. “I can tell you we don’t have all the metrics yet, but all the anecdotal evidence suggests very strongly that virtual drills offer learning and practice that are in some ways superior to the actual one. This is because you can get multiple vantage points—first-person, room-level vantage, moving the camera to see what’s happening from above—all of which provide situational awareness.”
Another virtual advantage is that people are much more willing to role play via their avatars because they set aside inhibitions that might prevent them from participating in some real world situations, he points out.
Harvey believes 3-D virtual environments are the Web’s future, and advises business people to move in early.
“Be on the leading edge of this,” he stresses. “If you are an early adopter, you can have a huge advantage. IBM already has 16 islands in Second Life because they want to be on the cutting edge. Other companies, such as Nissan, H&R Block, the NBA, CNN, Reuters, MTV, Sun, Dell, and Intel have jumped into the virtual world. A lot of success with new media involves being there and evolving with it, contributing to the direction it is going.”
