Interactive safety cards and gamification shape the future of airline safety instructions

Passengers’ safety knowledge is a key factor in determining the chance of surviving any life-threatening situation that can occur in aviation. Unfortunately, research on the instructions that airlines use on board to inform passengers of safety procedures has highlighted a serious lack of effectiveness, prompting calls for the creation of interactive versions of airline safety instructions to make them easier to learn and more engaging for passengers.

A new mobile app, called “Air Safety World”, provides the world’s first opportunity to try the electronic safety cards of future aviation. Safety procedures are brought to life by two AI-based, virtual flight attendants, guiding the user with personalized feedback as (s)he actively tries out the procedures first-hand in high-fidelity 3D aircraft cabins. The free app runs on Android and Apple devices, and the interactive training experiences include assuming the brace position, donning life preservers, wearing oxygen masks, finding the emergency exits on the most common types of airliners, opening the various types of aircraft doors.

The design of “Air Safety World” builds on research studies presented at the recent 8th International Fire & Cabin Safety Research Conference, organized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in Atlantic City, NJ. “The results of our studies” - says professor Luca Chittaro, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCI Lab) of the University of Udine – “showed that making airline safety instructions interactive improves their effectiveness, and passengers who learned airline instructions through an active exploration in 3D worlds made less errors and were faster in performing the safety procedures, such as donning a life preserver, in the real world”.

In addition to the interactive safety card, “Air Safety World” brings the gamification of aviation safety education even further, by including several games of different genres that turn key aviation safety messages into entertaining experiences. “Recent aircraft accidents have dramatically shown that messages such as ‘leave all your luggage behind’ are not getting through at all to the flying public” – says Chittaro. “For this reason” – he explains – “our lab uses gamification to allow players to experiment playfully with emergency situations, and learn experientially the effects of following or not correct behavior”. The games included in the app range from simulations that put players in charge of coordinating the evacuation of a crowd of passengers to fast-paced first-person action games in which the player runs a training course made of aircraft emergency exits that need to be quickly opened. Users can even build their own fleet of real-world airliners, and send them flying around the world.

The “Air Safety World” app is the latest result of an international aviation research project, which comprises also a collaboration between the HCI Lab of the University of Udine and the Cabin Safety Research Team of the FAA.

Scientific References

Chittaro L. Safety Briefings: Interactive and Non-interactive Solutions, 8th Triennial International Fire & Cabin Safety Research Conference, FAA, Atlantic City, NJ. https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/preview/2016Conference/conference.asp

Chittaro L. Educating passengers about life preserver donning, 8th Triennial International Fire & Cabin Safety Research Conference, FAA, Atlantic City, NJ. https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/preview/2016Conference/conference.asp

Multimedia Materials

Screenshots: click on the pictures on the right to enlarge them.

Download the “Air Safety World” app on Apple and Android devices: http://hcilab.uniud.it/asw