Abstract:

The number of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods and the number of victims are increasing worldwide, and disaster education is becoming increasingly important. Evacuation drills are a typical example of disaster education conducted at the elementary and secondary levels. However, it is difficult for students who have never experienced a disaster to understand natural disasters as their own personal matters through evacuation drills. One solution to this problem is to conduct a virtual experience of a natural disaster using Virtual Reality (VR) technology before an evacuation drill. However, VR technology requires a large amount of money to develop a practical environment. Therefore, it is difficult for all 40 students in a class to experience a natural disaster at the same time in elementary and secondary education.

In this study, first, we developed an environment in which all 40 students in one class can practice VR technology at the same time at low cost. Next, we conducted a class for second-year students of H High School (201 students, 5 classes) to understand natural disasters as their own personal matters through the experience of existing VR contents for disaster education. In this study, we distributed one pair of simplified VR goggles “Hakosuko (Tatami Ichigan)” (¥850/each) provided by Hakosuko Co. The “Hakosuko” can be easily assembled by putting together parts made of cardboard, and functions as VR goggles by inserting a smartphone no larger than 160 x 80 x 10 mm into the “Hakosuko”. In Japan, 99.3% of high school students own their own smartphones. Therefore, we were able to use each student's smartphone in the class practice without any problems. In the classroom practice, disaster prevention education VR content was played on each student's smartphone inserted into a pair of simple VR goggles. The content was “B-VR” (school version, 3 min. 28 sec.), which is available on YouTube by the Tokyo Fire Department. Specifically, the participants experienced a virtual disaster situation in a classroom, library, and entrance/exit of a school in the event of a 7.3-magnitude, 6-strength earthquake directly under the Tokyo metropolitan area.

By preparing a low-cost environment for practicing VR technology using simple VR goggles, all 40 students in one class were able to experience the earthquake simultaneously. Students who experienced the virtual earthquake commented, "I now know how to protect myself in case of a disaster in the classroom". These results indicate that even low-cost simple VR goggles can help students to understand earthquakes as their own personal matters.

Keywords:

Low-cost VR, Disaster Prevention Education, Elementary and Secondary Education, Evacuation Training.