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Security Focus
Idaho State Simulates Emergency Response in Second Life
5/1/2008
Far from finding Second Life a second-class substitute for the real thing, Ramloll said that exercises in the virtual world can be superior to real-world training exercises in a number of ways. While desk training might rely on maps and flip charts, along with a model of a town and hospital, Second Life can go much further.
Using Second Life's realistic online world gives a much more realistic feel to the hypothetical event, he said. As proof, Ramloll cites the level of interaction that quickly and naturally develops during training sessions. Because the aesthetics and fidelity of the environment tend to be highly realistic, he's seen students quickly become immersed in the incident at hand. In any case, Ramloll pointed out, a session in Second Life is "certainly more engaging than sitting around trying to work with simulated smoke and wounds...."
There are several cost-saving advantages to the project. Training emergency responders to handle large-scale catastrophes is an expensive proposition, and simulating a real-world pandemic, bioterrorism attack, or infectious disease outbreak takes extensive time and money. In a virtual world, those expenses are slashed.
The challenge of real-world disaster training, of course, includes not only the costs of shutting down an area and creating the expected chaos on-site, but gathering a large number of health care providers and emergency responders into a single place at a given time. With Second Life, students can participate from anywhere.
Ramloll, who worked closely with subject matter experts from the medical community on the Play2Train project, has created other distance-learning emergency preparedness training projects. Using Second Life saved huge sums during development because the virtual world already existed. "[Play2Train] is the cheapest virtual reality project I've ever worked on," he said, primarily because he hasn't had the cost of constructing the virtual world itself from scratch. The main cost in using Second Life--less than a twentieth of the project's overall cost--has been buying the three islands. Even with that cost, Ramloll said, "If you add this up, it's very cheap compared to creating your own virtual world from scratch."
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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