Responsibilities / Project Lead, Technical Oversight, 3 x Environments, Animations
The COVID-19 pandemic forced society to make significant lifestyle adjustments. For the Irish Road Safety Authority (RSA), this meant their educational focus was to shift gear from ‘in-school’ to ‘at home’, with learning resources distributed online to provide a safe and engaging remote learning environment for all students.
In collaboration with BBDO, Solarflare created a metaverse for road safety learning called ‘RSA Core’, as a means to harness innovative technology. Accessible through the browser the remote learning portal allows both RSA presenters and students to be virtually together whilst physically apart. Cast as avatars, the users are fully immersed and engaged within the 3D event space. Full with hosted RSA learning materials, such as presentations, videos, and animations, the content is tailored to certain age demographics and ready for a wide range of learning content to be taught.
APPROACH
Built in Mozilla Hubs, the 360 immersive environments with added spatial audio allowed RSA to immerse their students in stylistically bold colourful spaces with fun creative features like 3D objects and animated scenery, brilliant for younger audiences. Their attention fully engaged with awe and wonder, RSA is able to promote good road safety behaviour in a safe and impactful road education environment.
THE ENVIRONMENTS
From the beautiful Irish coastline and busy city streets to a themed “Seatbelt Sheriff” land the Virtual Learning experience consists of six different environments – all connected by an ‘RSA Core’.
Take a sneak at some of the following Virtual Learning experiences we created:
RSA CORE
The ‘RSA Core’ hub, a life-sized roundabout scene, is the gateway to the various themed learning spaces. The hub’s wheel structure represents RSA’s branding and values while showcasing Ireland’s diverse landscape with urban, town, rural, and coastal road scenes. These roads lead to themed learning zones through different doorways.
SEATBELT SHERIF
Presenters can teleport through a cave portal, enabling them to educate students about safety. We developed a unique educational journey known as “Seatbelt Sheriff,” which features the following: Barn Door, Cactus Corridor, Cross the Road Challenge, Hi-Glo Disco, Inside the Roller-skate and Map View.
CONSEQUENCES
I created an animated icon that came to life each time the headset spoke, to try and bring some additional personality and life to the voice.
SEATBELT ADULT
Starting within the Seatbelt Museum, presenters can take pupils through a virtual tour of the Seatbelt TV ad campaign. Able to include key subject matter in the form of 3D sculptures, video content and sound bites taken as inspiration from the TV advert.
SPLIT SECOND DANGERS
This room encapsulated the theme of being distracted whilst driving, taking inspiration from previous RSA content and integrating within this environment. Key statistics were displayed outlining true data that has been captured.
SPEEDING
Users get to explore this room learning the difference that speeding can have on the pedestrian death toll. We represented this by creating several doorways that automatically shut, increasing the speed and size of doorways to explain how the number of pedestrian deaths are hit by a car.
AWARDS
The Institute of Creative Advertising and Design Awards
- User Experience for Advertising, Silver Award.
- Creative Innovation, Silver Award.
- Digital Experience, Bronze Award.
- User Experience for Advertising, Silver Award.
- Creative Innovation, Silver Award.
- Digital Experience, Bronze Award.
12th Lovie Awards Winner
- Metaverse Individual: Weird & Experimental, Bronze Award.
- Metaverse Individual: Weird & Experimental, Bronze Award.
The Webby Awards, People’s Voice
- General Metaverse Experiences: Public Service & Activism, Nominated.
- General Metaverse Experiences: Public Service & Activism, Nominated.
