Abstract:

Some large-scale disasters occurred and the damages from those disasters were enormous in recent years. Even though DPE (disaster prevention education) is very important to reduce disaster risk, most people do not work hard on DPE. Therefore, in this study, we proposed "Real World Edutainment (RWE)" and have developed the RWE system, game-based evacuation drill, to provide high reality and effective experience and improve people’s motivation for disaster prevention.

The first version of the RWE system worked on a tablet computer. However, the reality was not enough in visual aspects. The second version of the RWE system which adopted markerless AR to improve the visual reality was still not enough.

To further improve the visual reality, we focused on HMD (head mounted display) as a new output device for the RWE system and a video game engine for 3D learning materials in the RWE system. Then, we extended the RWE system, adopting marker-based AR, Oculus Rift (a binocular opaque HMD), and Unity (3D video game engine).

We conducted a trial experiment (small-scale evacuation drill) using the extended RWE system and found that the visual reality was greatly improved. On the other hand, some problems remain unresolved. The extended RWE system did not provide a complete reality because of the recognition limits of the AR marker. Besides, almost all of the participants suffered from 3D sickness caused by the HMD. Our future work is to solve those problems and make the RWE system more practicable.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, AR, HMD, 3DCG, evacuation drill, disaster prevention education, real world.