Tsunami Drill

Secure your future, one try at a time. Physical security hack.

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Inspiration

From the start of the hackathon, we decided to go with physical security

We used our creativity to come up with an enhanced solution to an existing threat to public safety -- Tsunamis. In the past century, they have claimed over 260,000 lives. Even though, we cannot stop the force of nature, there is something we can do. Prepare.

However, there are several problems with existing tsunami drills:

  • They are rare. And if you don't live nearby a coast, the probability of you doing/learning about tsunamis is even smaller. You might forget, don't know what to do in the crucial moments when you are ought to make an important choice. Moreover, drills are not real-live scenarios, you can't get stressed and feel sense of emergency during them.

Therefore, we decided to use the best technology for creating memorable experiences and training behavioral skills - XR.

  • That technology allowed us to give users vibrant scenes, natural sounds and living experience to enhance memorization and learning process. We have used Mixed Reality, going from real surrounding to virtual disaster, to facilitate real world environment and help with battling stress during dangerous situations. By coming up with this solution, we believe we bring accessible and effective solution to the public safety issue.

What it does

  • We have utilized XR technology advantages over 2D softwares and in-person drills to make an immersive educational tsunami drill application. Problems we have found are: In-person drills cannot provide real-time rising water levels, do not give a feel of emergency to the students and cannot replicate realistic time frames of tsunami. Therefore, we created a training app that lets you practice finding the high ground while facing rising water levels and lack of visibility underwater. Moreover, we added realistic water shaders and stressful water sound effects to make the experience highly immersive and close to the real world scenario.
  • First, the user needs to set up their space and mark out walls, doors with Meta's scene creation tool. After they're presented with their space that is submerged into the water at the ground level. The water levels will be rapidly rising until the user will be fully underwater. On their wrist, they can see their health and oxygen levels that will keep users posted on how much longer they can be underwater. Oxygen will go down from 100% based on how long the user will be underwater, once they have no oxygen left, their health will decrease. The wrist UI also shows the "evacuation" button that will be available to touch after user reaches the upper ground door/level. If they successfully were able to go through mixed reality experience without losing most of their health, they will be greeted with the winning screen.

‼️ This accessible immersive experience has the potential of saving many lives ‼️

How we built it

  • Meta Quest 3
  • Unity 2022.3.16f1
  • Meta Interaction SDK v60, Meta Depth API & Scene API, Meta Interaction SDK
  • C# Scripting

Challenges we ran into

  • Since XR technology and SDK's are very new, our project was really unpredictable and wasn't behaving how we were expecting most of the time. We had to rebuild it with an older version SDK on Saturday, because on the newer version we couldn't run the scripts and features were not performing.
  • It was the first time for both of us working with Meta Quest 3 and it was a time-consuming process to go though documentation and try out features. Moreover, we had only one headset, which made building and testing even harder.
  • Macs do not support advanced XR development features, so we had to work remotely with each other on our PC's at apartments.

  • Depth API is a new technology, and it was hard to make it work and to make it understand the surroundings.

    Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a working demo with the all the required features we intended to implement.

  • Making immersive experience and bringing up an important topic within public safety in a creative manner.

  • From being total strangers to collaborating on advanced XR project. We are proud of our team work and the fact that we had great time working with each other!

What we learned

  • Pushing through the hardships and not giving up!
  • Learning how to resolve merge conflicts in Unity. If you thought merge conflicts are hard already, try to resolve them in Unity.
  • Unity and building for Meta Quest 3.
  • Meta Interaction SDK, Meta Depth API, types of render pipelines.
  • How to collaborate on XR project.

What's next for Tsunami Drill

  • Adding tips for navigating the scenes.
  • Adding timer and history of tries to track progress.
  • Maybe creating a parent app - Natural Disaster Drills, and have Tsunami Drill as one of the many more immersive experiences available there.

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