Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) is a popular technology to recreate reality-like scenarios, including dangerous ones, in a realistic but safe way. Because of this potential, VR based research has been applied in psychology studies to provide training and education about how to behave in emergencies such as fires, earthquakes, floods, or typhoons. All these different virtual scenarios have been built to observe how people react to emergencies, what behaviors they adopted, what level of stress is generated, and finally, how to increase citizens' safety. However, there is still little research that shows how Virtual Environment (VE) should be designed to convey appropriate social and psychological “cues” to participants. In this work, we present the result of a series of co-design sessions aiming to bring experts to collaborate in setting up virtual scenarios to increase the quality of life, safety perception, and risk awareness in people living in the proximity of a river. Floods are one of the most threatening climate events, and because of climate change, they are expected to become even more frequent. These disasters have a devastating impact on communities, increasing anxiety and stress levels in citizens living close to rivers. We involved relevant stakeholders to design “Safer Water,” an immersive, interactive, virtual experience to support citizens in psychologically and behaviorally managing pre and post riverbank breakdown situations. HCI experts, hydrogeological and hydraulic engineers, psychologists, and VEs designers took part in affinity diagram and brainstorming activities. Results show how the adopted method was able to generate suitable virtual scenarios, to highlight and classify relevant design requirements, and to find strategies that could improve the quality of life and psychological well-being in “risk-exposed citizens.” The discussion includes a set of open-access guidelines derived from the co-design activities, to support the design of VE for the purposes discussed in the paper.
Highlights
In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely employed to safely and realistically recreate situations that are difficult to investigate in the real world, such as risk environments and emergency contexts
In the first affinity diagram session related to the time before the embankment breakdown, several ideas were produced
The Contents macro-category was composed by the categories Narration and Events
Summary
Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely employed to safely and realistically recreate situations that are difficult to investigate in the real world, such as risk environments and emergency contexts. The fact that virtual simulations highly engage users and allow them to experience firsthand the consequences of their actions has meant that this technology has been effectively applied for educational purposes (often in the form of immersive serious games), for example in teaching the correct procedures to be implemented in risky context (Chittaro and Buttussi, 2015; Çakiroglu and Gökoglu, 2019). There is a certain disparity in the study of the different risk contexts, at least from a psychological point of view Situations such as fire emergency have been extensively investigated in VR, focusing on evacuation procedures (Kinateder et al, 2014), and training (Williams-Bell et al, 2015; Çakiroglu and Gökoglu, 2019), while for other kind of emergencies, such as river floods, these aspects are still relatively less considered. River floods are one of the most frequent and threatening climate events, and because of climate change, they are expected to become even more frequent and intense (WHO1 River floods have an increasingly devastating impact on communities and territories, diminishing the safety and quality of life of people living in the proximity of a river (Mason et al, 2010)
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