St John Ambulance has launched a virtual reality tool produced by Visualise to encourage more young people to learn ‘street first aid’ during the school holidays, when violent crime is known to spike.

The new tool, called Seconds to Save, is part of the health charity’s Young Responders programme – which has so far taught nearly 25,000 11-to-25 year-olds in the city how to give life-saving first aid to victims of violence such as a knife attack.

The immersive VR experience, is based around a short film in which two teenaged friends have a meaningless disagreement that escalates into one of them being stabbed. Users are invited to choose different scenarios which not only teach them practical first aid techniques but also show the consequences of knife crime from multiple perspectives.

Pauline Bartley, Young Responders Project Manager at St John Ambulance:

“Latest Government research shows there’s been a 27% increase in knife and weapon offences among young people in the past 10 years. These figures are exacerbated over the summer months, when many young people have unsupervised free time. By launching our Seconds to Save virtual reality tool, we hope to inspire and empower even more young people at risk of street crime with the skills and confidence to step in and save a life should the worst happen.”

The project uses a one of a kind 360 video camera called the Meta Two 3D – by Meta Camera. This system is the only fully immersive camera to give a truly real perspective in VR – there is the perfect IPD (inter pupillary distance). So when you’re on the street, in the middle of the crisis it feels real. You can see this camera in the image above.

The VR app that runs the whole experience is built to allow you to make choices that affect the outcome of the film, meaning you’re involved, it’s interactive and therefore more memorable.

A key feature in the app is the use of hand tracking – removing the confusion of controllers with lots of buttons and shortening the on-boarding time between uses.

The app was built in Unity and optimised for the Meta Quest series of headsets.

More info about the project can be found on the St John Ambulance website.