Abstract
Disaster education focusing on how we should take immediate actions after disasters strike is essential to protect our lives. However, children find it difficult to understand such disaster education. Instead of disaster education to children, adults should properly instruct them to take immediate actions in the event of a disaster. We refer to such adults as Immediate-Action Commanders (IACers) and attach importance to technology-enhanced IACer training programs with high situational and audio-visual realities. To realize such programs, we focused on digital game, augmented reality (AR) and head-mounted displays (HMDs). We prototyped three AR systems that superimpose interactive virtual objects onto HMDs’ real-time vision or a trainee’s actual view based on interactive fictional scenarios. In addition, the systems are designed to realize voice-based interactions between the virtual objects (i.e., virtual children) and the trainee. According to a brief comparative survey, the AR system equipped with a smartphone-based binocular opaque HMD (Google Cardboard) has the most promising practical system for technology-enhanced IACer training programs.
Highlights
We are always in danger of natural and human-caused disasters
Disaster education focusing on the execution of planned immediate actions against disasters, which has been conducted in various ways and scenes, is essential to protect our lives
There are two key issues: “What can be substituted for the real children?” and “How do we introduce a game element?” As the substitute, we adopt augmented reality (AR)-based interactive virtual children (i.e., 3DCG characters) who exhibit reactions and take immediate actions against disasters
Summary
We are always in danger of natural and human-caused disasters. For example, earthquakes and terrorist attacks are extremely dangerous because they occur with no prior warning. We do not always apply knowledge to immediate actions against a real disaster Because of these multiple reasons, disaster education is difficult to be established. IACer training programs must represent disasters realistically because trainees (e.g., school teachers) find it difficult to imagine disaster situations as they do not have a prior experience of such an event. Wahyudin and Hasegawa [5] developed a 3D roleplaying game that trains disaster volunteers to make appropriate ethical decisions These games aim at improving situational and audio-visual realities by scenarios and virtual worlds (computer sounds and graphics) respectively. Technology-enhanced IACer training programs should involve gaming technologies and the real world to further improve the situational and audiovisual realities. We considered implementing augmented reality (AR) that superimposes interactive virtual objects (e.g., 3DCG characters) on a real-time vision
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