AREarthQuakeDrill: Toward Increased Awareness of Personnel during Earthquakes via AR Evacuation Drills

Abstract

Evacuation drills are carried out to reduce the injury or death caused by earthquakes. However, the content of evacuation drills is generally predetermined for specific evacuation routes and actions. This inflexibility can reduce user motivation and sincerity.In this paper, we propose an Augmented Reality (AR) based evacuation drill system. We use an optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) for mapping a room and recognizing interior. Our system constructs an AR drill environment of the real environment, and reproduces the after-effects of an earthquake by applying vibrations to the objects. We evaluated our system in an experiment with 10 participants. Comparing cases with and without AR obstacles, we found that AR training affected participant motivation and the diversity of traversed evacuation routes during practice.