The Camden County Prosecutor’s Office has enlisted Penn’s School of Nursing and Annenberg School for Communication’s Virtual Reality ColLABorative to create a locally tailored training video on Narcan administration, using virtual reality to create an immersive viewing experience. County officials recently announced the launch of the nine-minute video, which is supported by funding from the 2022 Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) Operation Helping Hand grant, administered by the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for Camden County to get as many people trained as possible, to reach as many people as we can,” prosecutor Grace C. MacAulay said. The video lays out Narcan administration in simple terms and provides the reassurance that “it can’t hurt you; it can only help, and even if it turns out someone did not need it, there’s no harm, nor liability.”

John Pellicane, director of the Camden County Office of Mental Health and Addiction, said that training decreases stigma while increasing education and acceptance of harm reduction. He said the county has NaloxBoxes in public libraries, health facilities, schools, courts, bars, motels, parks, and other settings where someone might be able to respond to an overdose. The county has Overdose Emergency Kits on some school buses and has so far trained 275 school bus drivers to respond to an overdose.

The Camden County-Penn partnership stemmed from a prior training video co-created by Kyle Cassidy, a technologist at Annenberg, and is the third in a series of VR Narcan training collaborations with Penn Nursing, following trainings of nursing students in 2018 and laypeople in Philadelphia in 2020. Mr. Cassidy co-founded the Annenberg Virtual Reality ColLABorative in 2022 with research associate Katerina Girginova, who received her PhD from Annenberg in 2018.

Anyone can watch the video online. Watching it with a cell phone inserted into a Google Cardboard viewer available for $10—or any virtual reality headset—provides an immersive and transporting experience. Those watching it without a device can drag the cursor across the video to get a 360-degree view.

Katerina Girginova, co-director of the Annenberg Virtual Reality ColLABorative, said she also hopes this mode of delivery will appeal to younger audiences. She added that VR training combines different learning styles—such as visual, aural, and kinesthetic—“which potentially makes for an impactful learning experience.” Mr. Cassidy notes VR isn’t a new technology but “a bunch of old technologies used in new ways,” explaining that making a video involves merging several fish-eye lenses and attaching them to an accelerometer.

Annenberg doctoral students Kate Okker-Edging, Nya Mbock, and undergraduate student Oscar Vazquez, helped write the script for the Camden County video.

At last week’s press conference, Camden County Commissioner Director Louis J. Cappelli said the video “will be used as a fast and easy alternative” to support Naloxone training for students and staff, bus drivers, and others who carry the lifesaving pharmaceutical. “Narcan is a critical tool in our battle against the opioid and overdose epidemic,” Commissioner Director Cappelli said. “It is imperative that as many people as possible are trained in how to administer this lifesaving medication, and this instructional video will help us do that. I am extremely proud that Camden County is continuing to lead the way when it comes to defeating the opioid epidemic.”