FIDAS Delivery Service
FIDAS - Federazione Italiana Associazioni Donatori di Sangue
Young adults
Project TypeVirtual Reality
ScopeEducation
An awareness project designed to promote blood donation through virtual reality gaming.
To attract and engage younger generations in understanding the importance of blood donation.
A VR game where the user, embodying FIDAS, is tasked with saving as many lives as possible by delivering the most suitable blood groups to hospitals.
The project
FIDAS is an association dedicated to promoting voluntary, anonymous, and free blood and blood component donation. It's a complex awareness challenge: reaching the younger generations and capturing their attention is difficult. Hence, a virtual reality project was created to involve and educate the younger generations about the importance of donating blood.
Inside the experience
Wearing the VR headset, the user finds themselves inside a blood sorting center: a space with a complex network of tubes where groups of nurses are busy at work. Here, a quirky character, the FIDAS Supervisor, appears and invites us to test an "experimental" method for delivering blood during emergencies.
The player is then transported to the arena, where he will discover multiple ongoing emergencies, just like in the real world. To address them, he must "dispatch" the correct number of blood group packages (each distinguished by a specific color) donated by donors to hospitals for patients in need.
However, challenges arise: various obstacles hinder the delivery process (such as moving walls, time-sensitive targets, disruptive antagonists), and the player must find ways to overcome them. The biggest challenge, though, is donor shortage (resulting in blood scarcity) or the presence of incompatible blood groups.
At the end of each game, lasting approximately 10/15 minutes, the FIDAS Supervisor guides the user back to the sorting center, where he is greeted by all the donors who assisted with their donations during the experience and the patients they managed to save thanks to them. This conclusion highlights two significant and little-known aspects of donation: the stark numerical disparity between donors and patients, and the fact that each patient and donor is an individual with their own real-life, not just a number. This is a key element in effectively conveying the value of donation.
About the design
The starting point for shaping the project was the belief that children and adolescents have a clear sensitivity to gaming dynamics. We built an experience to convey the urgency of donation. We created a virtual world mirroring the real one, where hospitals and healthcare centers constantly request blood bags.
Reflexes, speed, spatial awareness, and precision: the experience touches the chords of popular video games. It does so in an immersive way without losing sight of the main goal: raising awareness among the younger generation about donation. The graphical aspects were also designed to create a virtual environment as inclusive as possible, capable of surpassing trends. Following in the footsteps of cult games like Mario Bros, we focused on universally appreciated simplicity. In other words, we aimed for a broad target audience to convey the values that FIDAS has been promoting for over sixty years.