Images: St John WA

DESCRIPTION

St John Ambulance WA wanted to develop a world-first, innovative way of teaching first aid, to teach this important life skill in a way that would be engaging especially for younger audiences, as well as digitally accessible without an in-person trainer. This resulted in the concept of First Aid Skills VR - a series of interactive VR experiences designed to teach users first aid topics, offered to the general public as fully certified and thorough first aid training content as an alternative to face-to-face training.

I was brought on as the sole developer for this project to see it through to release. I designed it in a three-stage approach: for each first aid topic, the users were first taught the theory of the first aid (including things like zoomed-in or see-through anatomy) to understand WHY the first aid works, they then got to practise the first aid skills in a safe environment, and finally they were teleported into a realistic emergency scenario where they had to apply what they had learnt without assistance. A cheerful robotic character named Mia guides the user along their first aid journey.

We utilised the HTC Vive Pro headset with the LeapMotion for hand tracking, enabling people to use natural hand motions which are important in first aid. I developed all the code as cross-platform, to support VR as well as mobile, for release onto Android and iOS, so people could learn the first aid skills without the physical hardware of the full VR version. The CPR topic included the use of a physical CPR dummy with custom sensors and Arduino boards to measure CPR proficiency (speed and depth), built by an engineer and coded by myself.

The experiences were designed to be deployed commercially across the State, in custom-built "pods" which included the VR setup as well as a large screen. St John held a large public event at Yagan Square for "Restart a Heart" day to publicly launch the project, with the VR experience and tablet experience being the main attraction.

ROLE

I was the Lead Developer, developing ~95% of coding and Unity development for the commercial launch, including comprehensive cross-platform code frameworks for all functionality and DRSABCD / CPR / Defibrillation topics.

I also contributed to the design and marketing, and was the voice artist for Mia the main robot character. I worked alongside a single 3D Artist and a Project Manager.

WEBSITE

https://www.stjohnwa.com.au/first-aid-training/first-aid-skills

MEDIA

Perth Now