Development of a VR prototype for enhancing earthquake evacuee safety

Abstract

Training and education for enhancing evacuee safety is essential to reduce deaths, injuries and damages from disasters, such as fire and earthquake. However, traditional training approaches, e.g. evacuation drills, hardly simulate the real world emergency, which lead to the limitation of reality and poor interaction. In addition, traditional approaches may not provide investigation of participants' behavior during evacuations and give feedback after training. As a novel and effective alternative to overcome these limitations, in this paper, a VR-based training prototype system is designed and implemented for enhance earthquake evacuation safety. Key modules including earthquake scenario simulation, damage representation, interaction, player investigation and feedback are developed. In the immersive VR environment, players can be provided with learning outcomes as well as behavior feedback as crucial goals for safety training. Based on the result of the evaluation, this prototype has proven to be promising for enhancing earthquake evacuee safety and shows positive pedagogical functions.