Case Study: VR training for Estonian Rescue Board

Immersive VR training solution for Estonian Rescue Board

Client: Estonian Rescue Board

Creative Agency: C-Studio

Partners Involved: Flink Studios

At the end of 2018 Estonian Rescue Board (ERB) held a tender to find a partner for their VR training environment “Fire Hazardous House”. For the project, a full-scale house would be needed to be modelled; inside the house, the user would move around and solve 14 different situations to prevent a potential fire.

The solution would be targeted to youth and children. Namely, ERB has fire prevention department that invites school groups to their centres, visits schools and fairs. The project was completed with a record of 5 weeks from the start, co-operation with the client was astoundingly smooth.

Client Profile:

The Estonian Rescue Board is a government agency under the Ministry of the Interior that develops and maintains a secure environment in Estonia, anticipates threats and promptly and professionally assists people in the event of an accident. With approximately 2200 employees, the Estonian Rescue Board is the second largest public sector body.

The Estonian Rescue Board has departments that develop, plan and manage activities and Regional Rescue Centers and the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Center implementing the activities. North, South, East and West Regional Rescue Centers organize day-to-day rescue work, fire safety surveillance, emergency prevention, and crisis management.

The mission of the Estonian Rescue Board is to prevent accidents, save lives, property, and the environment.

The problem addressed:

Fire Prevention Department at ERB needed to find new and engaging methods for involving young people and raising overall awareness.

The solution provided:

C-Studio provided A-Z service to address their need by developing immersive “Fire Hazardous House” in VR, enabling users to detect and solve different hazardous situations.

Project Phases:

Development of the VR “Fire Hazardous House”

The project was initiated by our very innovative client Estonian Recue Board (Eesti Päästeamet), namely Arvi Uustalu, Janek Innos and Sandra Tammiksaar. Their idea was generally simple but working: lets design a virtual house with numerous fire hazardous situations user must detect!

They came up with 14 different situations, anything from placing a smoke detector or putting out burning grease. The user must move around the house from room to room and discover and disable such fire risks.

The project had an extremely short timeline of ca five weeks in total and a limited budget, so we worked very closely with ERB. They gave us very specific specification that helped to avoid misunderstandings and we had no delays.

For the environmental style, we used low-poly, using both ready assets and designing many new ones. We solved the movement by teleportation and all assets (objects) have pre-determined (re-) placement spots for saving development time. All activities are followed by a voice-over telling the user what he/she did right and why so (the VO was recorded by ERB’s deputy director Kuno Tammearu personally!); all environment was convincing due to in-depth sound design and 3D sound effects.

Above a gallery to show some of the photos.

Please also feel free to see the video above!