USING AR AND HMD FOR DISASTER PREVENTION EDUCATION

In recent years, large-scale disasters have occurred worldwide. Therefore, we need to have an interest in disaster prevention and guard our lives and properties from disasters. However, some people do not have an interest in disaster prevention.

In order for many people to get interested in disaster prevention, we focused on ICT-based disaster prevention education (DPE) and developed game-based evacuation using a tablet computer. This drill is realized by the RWE (Real World Edutainment) system, which presents digital materials associated with a learner’s current location. This system has a function of makerless AR (Augmented Reality) that superimposes virtual disaster situations (images) onto real-time vision captured by the tablet computer in order to increase the visual reality. However, the visual reality is still not enough because the size of the tablet computer’s display is not larger.

In this study, we adopt on a binocular opaque HMD (Head Mounted Display) to further increase the visual reality of the AR materials and extend the RWE system. The extend system can superimpose not only images but also videos onto the real-time vision and present the AR materials on the HMD.

We experimentally used the extended system at a DPE event and obtained favorable questionnaire results from the visitors.