A non-immersive virtual reality serious game application for flood safety training

Abstract

Various methodologies and technologies have been developed and tested to train communities for natural hazards and investigate human behaviour. The combination of Virtual Reality (VR) and Serious Games (SG) represents a promising solution to expose communities to different hazardous scenarios in a totally safe way and without exposing the testers to any real risks. Previous studies tested VR SG for several different natural hazards and safety training scenarios, but only a few applications have been proposed within the context of flood safety training. Furthermore, comprehensive prototyping works aimed at evaluating VR SG applications in terms of knowledge acquisition, self-efficacy and user experience, are still needed.This work proposes a novel non-immersive VR SG in the context of users' safety in the event of flooding in the urban built environment, pursuing the users' safety training. The proposed application is based on several modules, which can be combined to form different storylines and training objectives. The VR SG capabilities are demonstrated here by firstly considering one significant storyline. Results show a significant increase in self-efficacy and safety knowledge after the VR experience, thus suggesting the possibility to exploit it for increasing users’ awareness and preparedness. Furthermore, results also demonstrate the existence of similarities between real-world behaviours and VR choices by the tested individuals, thus suggesting how an application of this kind could also be used to support the development and validation of flood evacuation simulators.