Earthquake Safety Training through Virtual Drills

Changyang Li, Wei Liang, Chris Quigley, Yibiao Zhao, Lap-Fai Yu

Abstract:

Recent popularity of consumer-grade virtual reality devices, such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, has enabled
household users to experience highly immersive virtual environments. We take advantage of the commercial availability of these
devices to provide an immersive and novel virtual reality training approach, designed to teach individuals how to survive earthquakes,
in common indoor environments. Our approach makes use of virtual environments realistically populated with furniture objects for
training. During a training, a virtual earthquake is simulated. The user navigates in, and manipulates with, the virtual environments to
avoid getting hurt, while learning the observation and self-protection skills to survive an earthquake. We demonstrated our approach
for common scene types such as offices, living rooms and dining rooms. To test the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an
evaluation by asking users to train in several rooms of a given scene type and then test in a new room of the same type. Evaluation
results show that our virtual reality training approach is effective, with the participants who are trained by our approach performing
better, on average, than those trained by alternative approaches in terms of the capabilities to avoid physical damage and to detect
potentially dangerous objects.