The natural disaster sand more and more frequent extreme weather events, likewise the recent floods in Slovenia, Italy or Germany (not to mention a catastrophic flooding in Libya), demonstrated, that even the fine alert systems and top first “responder” organisations can not prevent fatalities and serious damage on property without having prepared the citizens how to act and react during disaster situations and crises, understand alerts and follow instructions. B-prepared offers a cost-effective solution for building a culture of disaster preparedness with a multi-actor approach in realistic historical scenarios. B-prepared builds on a freely accessible massive collaborative knowledge base and data hub, demonstrating its usefulness via three demonstrator applications: a cooperative multiplayer VR (Virtual Reality) serious game, simulating real disaster scenarios for the safest near-real experience; an interactive gamified mobile app with age-appropriate content and enhanced accessibility to people with specific functional needs for the widest possible reach; and LMS (Learning management system) system will be established and mainstreamed to effectively and comparably measure preparedness levels achieved by VR and/or mobile users on a unified scale. Players can take different roles to solve puzzle tasks in an immersive experience. Team-play, collaboration and communication are keys to survival, strengthening the culture of mutual assistance and cooperation in danger. Player behavior and game-play logged in a privacy-preserving way helps collect data on in-game behavior which serves assessment of preparedness but will also be shared with other matching research in the same field. A large-scale virtual reality hackathon series will demonstrate its features. The open beta will be publicly available as a giveaway, inviting stakeholders via direct outreach. After closing beta, the game will be available in a non-profit freemium model where in-game purchases are replaced by in-game donations for relief organizations, with a small percentage kept for maintenance and further development.
Development Policy Foundation is proudly supporting the Municipality of Ustka in project’s outputs tailored development, drawing on the equipment at disposal of State Emergency Service or PSP as well that of the voluntary fire brigades unites or OSP throughout the Municipality, given some of focal OSP units are fully integrated into the state emergency preparedness system, further taking stock of localized climate change challenges of e.g. mutually compounding events of king storm tide at the Baltic Sea, back-flow at Slupia river (one flowing into Baltics in Ustka), combined with the flash flood within its basins.
B-prepared: Building PREPAREDness with Collaborative Knowledge Platform, Gamification and Serious Game in Virtual Reality is implemented by the consortia led by Hungarian Institute for Computer Science and Control, along the partners, including the Municipality of Ustka.
The project is founded by the European Union under HORIZON Europe Innovation Actions.