Lord and his team will track the improvements of personnel after playing the game. At end of the game, they’ll take a post-test. Based on their virtual performance, players will receive an after-action review of what they did right and wrong. They’ll perform within the incident the primary roles of medical command, triage, and treatment. ![]() Zero Hour measures how players respond to incidents through a defined process. For the public good and the community we serve, there will be great benefits to this game.” ![]() And people will learn the right things that can be done to save people’s lives. People will better understand what EMS is on a day-to-day basis and in a disaster. “I think that’s one of the spectacular things you’ll see out of Zero Hour. “Someone who’d played America’s Army was able to save someone’s life in an auto accident from the medic role he had played in that game,” said Lord. Lord doesn’t know what impact this game will have on the public and non-EMS players who download and play it, but he noted that with America’s Army, there have been instances where medical expertise learned in a game led to a real-world, life-saving incident (in Raleigh, NC). Although the game was designed for EMS personnel to use as part of their real-world certification for emergency response, anyone can play Zero Hour from anywhere, on any PC. Lord said that Virtual Heroes’ use of Unreal Engine 3 technology has created a virtual environment that’s vividly detailed and also great from a cost perspective. Most places may do this once a year, and ultimately, when a disaster happens, it will probably be the biggest event of your career as an EMT.” said Lord. What made things difficult were the logistics and command and control, the communication and the process by which you accessed and moved assets to affected areas… all those inherent operational issues in a large-scale event that are difficult and that we don’t get to practice on a daily basis, much less a monthly basis. The ability to diagnose a large number of patients in unfriendly surroundings, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, will challenge even seasoned EMS personnel. Zero Hour allows personnel to experience unique issues around managing an emergency incident, like an earthquake or terrorist attack, while triaging a large number of patients and maintaining an operational environment. The expectation to be prepared for these types of events is more difficult without practicing it.” “Even ambulance rescuers and EMTs who work in a large city might see a large-scale event with 50 to 100 patients occur maybe once or twice in a career. “One of the challenges we face is that people rarely get to practice response to large-scale events because, thankfully, we don’t have many of them,” said Lord. Heneghan said with UE3 his team was able to show minute details like blood in a patient’s eyes, which is a key symptom that will unlock one major scenario in the game. In essence, the game offers 3D puzzles with lifelike environments, like an exploding stadium and victims that respond to questions. After a quick tutorial level that instructs the player how to navigate the virtual world (Lord expects a large segment of older specialists will not have any videogame experience), the game opens up to unique disaster scenarios that escalate as the player investigates and journeys from one situation to the next. The game, downloadable from, puts players through training exercises that include four of the 15 national planning scenarios from the U.S. “UE3 features that we took advantage of included volumetric environmental effects, on-the-fly real-time shaders, pre-computed shadow masks, directional light maps, particle physics, and environmental effects.” ![]() “ Zero Hour is intended to fully take advantage of all the bells and whistles of Unreal Engine 3 while creating a uniquely suspenseful, immersive, virtual world for training real medics,” explained Heneghan. ![]() Heneghan decided the best tool for the job was Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3. After all, Heneghan, founder of Virtual Heroes, had worked on the Department of Defense’s America’s Army online game, so Lord felt this team was best-suited for their virtual training game, Zero Hour: America’s Medic. So when it came time for the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute to take training of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) online, Greg Lord, associate director of the National EMS Preparedness Initiative, looked no further than Jerry Heneghan’s studio. RALEIGH, NC - Raleigh, NC-Virtual Heroes is a leading creator of serious games.
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