Professor Cornelia Boldyreff

Pandora Project
Virtual training for emergency situations

Cornelia Boldyreff

Human emotion is one of the most challenging elements in any emergency, but it is almost impossible to prepare crisis managers for how they will react when the worst happens.

This is where the ‘Pandora’ project comes in. Pandora is an advanced 3D virtual training environment that simulates the complexity and fast-moving nature of a real emergency in order to train crisis managers.

UEL is delivering the EU-funded project in collaboration with the UK Government, the University of Greenwich, Italy’s Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Fondazione Ugo Bordoni and CEFRIEL, Slovenia’s XLAB, and ORT in France

The Pandora programme is aimed at professional crisis managers, those who set the overall goals in an emergency. Up until now the only training options have been dry and unrealistic table-top exercises, or expensive and time-consuming real-world exercises. Pandora bridges the gap between these two options, providing a truly immersive, chaotic and stressful environment.

Pandora focuses firmly on human behaviour, as the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe often lies in one or two bad decisions made under intense pressure. Pandora monitors the emotional reactions of participants, which are highly unpredictable. It even has an ‘emotion engine’, known as the Engaging Interaction Framework, which allows the trainer to turn the pressure up or down.

A Pandora exercise can take place in a real room or on a distributed basis in a virtual room, with crisis managers participating from different locations. Distributed crisis managers will be able to interact, replicating the wider, potentially global dynamics of an emergency.
Professor Cornelia Boldyreff, who leads UEL’s work on Pandora, says “What we’re creating is a near-real training environment at affordable cost. Our role has been largely on the technical side. We’ve developed the distributed virtual environment and the underlying integration middleware that makes the Pandora system possible.”

“It’s very difficult to bring strategic managers together, but with Pandora we can run an exercise where we can provide an avatar to represent a missing agency head. The project is vital as we need to train people before an emergency happens, to avert a crisis turning into a full-scale disaster.”