Picture this:
You’re standing in the lobby of an office building waiting for the elevator. The only thing in view is an evacuation map posted on the wall so you take it in. Several minutes later, you’re sitting comfortably in a waiting room when the fire alarm goes off.
Can you remember the map? Do you know where the closest emergency exit is? Unfortunately, most people in this situation won’t know which way to go.
Fire drills save lives.
They’re also costly, a hassle to schedule, and routinely leave people out of the loop. Visitors, delivery people, contractors, and hybrid employees working remotely on the wrong day are just some of the folks who frequent public spaces without ever receiving evacuation training.
Maps don’t work. GPS works a little too well. Now what?
Today, more than ⅔ of the population struggles to read a basic map, and we’re all increasingly reliant on GPS guidance to get around.
The problem with the rise of mobile GPS is that step-by-step navigation switches off our natural spatial awareness, interfering with our development of cognitive maps—the system in our brain that helps us find our way.
Even after following GPS instructions from point A to point B, most of us will struggle to recall the exact route we took, having formed no mental map of the journey.
This is why LOCI created Exit Test, a digital drill system that empowers safety leaders to proactively familiarize people with their surroundings through video simulations and web-based games that build their cognitive maps.
How to turn on the supercomputer in your head.
Exit Test’s design is based on three key breakthrough discoveries in the field of neuroscience and one piece of ancient wisdom:
1. Our brains have their own natural GPS system made up of “grid cells,” which record the lay of the land wherever we go, and “place cells,” which remember landmarks and locations.
2. Watching a 3D video that simulates walking a particular path activates our natural GPS as if we’re physically there, giving us the ability to learn routes in the real world through a phone or a tablet.
3. The brain is estimated to have a storage capacity of 2.5 petabytes, which is equivalent to a billion mp3s or 300 million hours of television.
4. The method of loci—aka ‘memory palace’—is a 2,500-year-old memorization technique that uses our spatial memory to store and recall vast amounts of information. Think Sherlock Holmes levels of data.
Our brains’ connection between location and memory evolved over millennia, and stimulating this deep neural link is like turning on a supercomputer inside your head. Exit Test does this by generating personalized, hyperlocal 3D evacuation videos that activate your spatial memory to increase your familiarity with new environments. By combining the power of digital twins and game engines with the accessibility of the web, Exit Test makes evacuation routes quick and easy for anyone to learn.
Now picture this:
It’s 5 years from now and you’re standing in the lobby of an office building waiting for the elevator. There’s a new dynamic sign on the wall where an old flat map used to be. The screen plays a 3D video of a route from the elevator doors to the nearest emergency exit. The video plays on a short loop and, after seeing it a few times, you close your eyes and see the path play in your mind as if you were walking it. Your cognitive map now includes the quickest, shortest way to safety should anything go wrong.
You are in the LOCI future, where people are empowered with awareness and the places we go are safer for everyone.
