A Behalf Studio team member introduces the RENEW AR app to schoolchildren at the Mine Action Visitor Center in Quảng Trị, February 2025. On the walls behind her: wartime photographs and a map showing locations of all the postwar accidents in the province.
QUANG TRI — Earlier this year, a group of schoolchildren gathered at the Mine Action Visitor Center in Quảng Trị for an Explosive Ordnance Risk Education (EORE) session. This is familiar in a province where the dangers beneath the ground have shaped everyday awareness for generations. What felt new was the device in the instructor’s hand: through her phone, a cluster munition appeared on the ground in front of her. Interactive, three-dimensional, and close enough to walk around and examine. No one was in danger. That was precisely the point.
The session marked the debut of RENEW AR — Safe Steps, Safe Life, a free augmented reality mobile application developed by RENEW in partnership with Behalf Studio, with support from the Government of Ireland through the Irish Embassy in Vietnam. A video recap of the launch was shared on April 4 to mark the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action — and with it, the app’s download links were made available to the public for the first time.
8,600 Casualties — and a Record That Didn’t Hold
Since 1975, the former Quang Tri has recorded more than 8,600 casualties from UXO accidents. One in three of those victims was a child under the age of 16. These are not relics of a distant past. They are the accumulated cost, measured in individual lives and families, of living on land that the war saturated with ordnance and that decades of clearance work have not yet made fully safe.
According to the Quang Tri Mine Action Center (QTMAC), cluster munitions — known locally as bom bi, or “bombies” — account for 21% of total UXO casualties in the province. They are among the most deceptive of the remnants: small, numerous, and capable of lying inert for decades before detonating. Their presence is not merely a safety threat. It is a persistent obstacle to normal land use, keeping fields unfarmed and construction sites dangerous, constraining the economic recovery of communities still carrying the weight of the war.
The milestone year of 2019 marked the first time since the end of the war that Quang Tri recorded zero UXO accidents — a historic achievement born of decades of sustained clearance, risk education, and community engagement. The record held through 2021. Then, between 2022 and 2024, five male residents — aged 15, 34, 43, 44, and 50 — fell victim to UXO accidents. Three of those accidents were fatal. The work is not finished.
The age range of those five victims tells its own story. UXO does not target a particular demographic. It waits. It is found by farmers, by construction workers, by young people whose curiosity outpaces their caution, and by men who have lived beside this danger their entire lives and, one day, encounter it somewhere new.
Half the Land Cleared — the Other Half Still Waiting
As of March 2026, clearance teams from NPA/RENEW, MAG, and PTVN have cleaned up 46.8% of the total area confirmed to be contaminated by cluster munitions in what is now South Quang Tri — 619,465,479 square meters of land surveyed, of which nearly half has been released back to communities.
That 46.8% represents an enormous achievement — years of painstaking survey and technical clearance in difficult terrain. It also means that more than half of the confirmed contaminated area remains. At current rates, clearance will continue for years, if not decades. Communities living on or near that land cannot wait for a cleared certificate before they need to know how to stay safe. Explosive Ordnance Risk Education must run in parallel with clearance — not as a temporary measure, but as a sustained, long-term investment in its own right.
Three Objects, Three Lessons, One App
RENEW AR — Safe Steps, Safe Life focuses on the three types of cluster munitions most commonly found in Quảng Trị — the objects behind that 21% casualty figure, the ones most likely to be mistaken for something harmless, and the ones a person is most likely to encounter without recognizing the danger.
An educator shows the RENEW AR app on a tablet to a small group of students seated in a circle, surrounded by free-from-explosive ordnance casings on display at the Visitor Center.
Using the camera on any modern smartphone or tablet, the app overlays photorealistic three-dimensional models of these munitions onto the user’s real-world surroundings. A student can place a rendered bombie on the classroom floor and walk around it. A farmer can see what a particular type looks like against the red laterite soil they work every day. The object responds to movement, holds its position, and can be examined from angles no flat illustration can provide.
The app teaches three core behaviors: identifying the objects by appearance; responding correctly — maintaining distance, marking the location, reporting to authorities — rather than touching or moving them; and understanding that any unfamiliar object in the ground is already a reason to stop. Attached to a visual memory of a specific object seen up close, these responses are more likely to be recalled when they matter most.
Students gather around a phone as a Youth Union educator demonstrates the app.
Step 2 of the RENEW AR app: Đánh dấu nơi phát hiện vật nổ — mark the location where the explosive object was found. The app guides users through safe response behavior step by step.
At the February launch at the Mine Action Visitor Center, children who had grown up hearing warnings about UXO from parents and grandparents encountered, for the first time, a visual representation of the objects described. Educators from both RENEW and Behalf Studio were present. Engagement was immediate.
Video recap of the February 2025 introduction of RENEW AR — Safe Steps, Safe Life at the Mine Action Visitor Center in South Quang Tri. Published April 4, 2025, on the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action.
A New Province, a Larger Challenge
The context for this work has recently grown more complex. Quang Tri Province has been merged with Quang Binh to form a new, enlarged administrative unit — a significantly wider geographical area with a larger population and a longer stretch of contaminated land to address. South Quang Tri, the former province, now sits within a broader territory that includes heavily contaminated corridors along the former Ho Chi Minh Trail bordering Laos, where some of the most underserved communities in the region live.
Physical outreach — trained educators traveling to remote villages, conducting sessions, returning for follow-up — is resource-intensive and difficult to scale across mountainous terrain. An app that a community health worker can demonstrate on a phone, that a teacher can use without specialist training, that a family can share at home, extends the reach of risk education in ways traditional methods cannot easily replicate. It does not replace field-based EORE. But in the upland communities along the former trail, it may be the first time someone sees a realistic image of what they should not touch — and that encounter could matter.
The Partnership Behind the Screen
The technical development of the app was carried out by Behalf Studio, whose team worked closely with RENEW’s EORE program staff to ensure accuracy in every 3D model — the right dimensions, surface texture, and weathering for objects that have spent decades in the ground. In this field, an inaccurate model is not an aesthetic failure. It is a safety risk.
The Government of Ireland, through the Irish Embassy in Vietnam, provided the funding that made the project possible — reflecting a long-standing Irish commitment to mine action in Southeast Asia and a shared understanding that education and clearance must advance together.
A student browses the RENEW AR — Bước Chân An Toàn listing on the App Store. The app is free to download on both iOS and Android.
Download RENEW AR — Safe Steps, Safe Life for free:
📱 iOS: Download on the App Store
📱 Android: Download on Google Play
Investing in Peace, One Safe Step at a Time
The theme of this year’s International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action — Invest in Peace; Invest in Mine Action — carries particular weight in Quang Tri. The zero-accident year of 2019 showed what sustained investment in clearance and education can achieve. The accidents between 2022 and 2024 showed how much remains to do. And the clearance data — 46.8% of confirmed contaminated land released after decades of work — shows that EORE is not a temporary measure while the real work gets done. It is part of the real work, for as long as that land takes to clear.
Download RENEW AR — Safe Steps, Safe Life. Share it. And support the work that is, step by careful step, making Quang Tri’s land safe again.
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