NATS: Visualising Air Traffic Management

Description

NATS (National Air Traffic Services) is the main Air Navigation Service Provider in the United Kingdom. Was part of the team that helped partake in their Serious GameJam in which we had 24 hours to build them a rough and ready prototype. This prototype looked at Visualising Air Traffic Management which and acted as a proof of concept for educating and training new employees working in Air Traffic Control. Being one of the winners of this GameJam, we were awarded with going down to their Edinburgh site and discussing how AR/VR could be brought into Education and a wider Curriculum.

Challanges Encountered

Working on such a tight time constraint of only 24 hour to develop the application which meant developing a scope and application design early was really important.

My Contribution

I worked alongside a fellow programmer where I worked on the mutiplayer part of the game. Developing the second player in the airtraffic controll tower alongside developing the naming system which was based off real airplane names.

What has been Learnt

This was my first ever 'Serious Game'. Trying to make us of my game development knowlege and then implement that into a traditionally non games realted application. As such a lot more time has to go into building a lot more user freindly operations. With most intended users unlikely to have a core games knowlege based assumption can not be made. Using VR this is even more important to try and make the 'Game' work exactly as expected and try to remove the need for in game instruction but instead having more natural controls than the user can just pick up and use.

Products Used

  • Unreal Engine 4 - C++
  • Git
  • Git LFS