Virtual Reality Fire Disaster Training System for Improving Disaster Awareness

PubDate: March 2019

Teams: Ritsumeikan University，Osaka Institute of Technolog

Writers: Sho Ooi；Taisuke Tanimoto；Mutsuo Sano

PDF: Virtual Reality Fire Disaster Training System for Improving Disaster Awareness

Abstract

The current state of disaster prevention education in schools involves people who are unaware of the necessity of education (i.e., people with no intrinsic motivation and disaster education away). To facilitate disaster prevention education, we propose a virtual reality (VR) disaster prevention training system focused on fire disasters. This system has three modes, namely, VR evacuation drills, VR firefighting training, and VR comprehensive training. First, VR evacuation drills can be learned by users by gaining experience of evacuation methods in cases of fire. Second, users can undergo VR firefighting training by gaining experience of extinguishing methods. Finally, in general training, the users can experience trial training in case of fires on the basis of the knowledge gained in the evacuation and fire drills. We conducted an experiment by dividing participants into two groups: one group was trained using existing methods employing teaching materials, whereas the other was trained using the proposed method. Subsequently, we conducted VR comprehensive training and an IMMS evaluation to investigate whether this system demonstrates an improvement over existing teaching methods. The results indicated that the proposed system achieved better results in terms of attention (+1.58), relevance (+0.7), confidence (+0.2), and user satisfaction (+2.16). Furthermore, for groups trained with the proposed system, the average evacuation risk of the player during VR comprehensive training was -6.45 p, the fire extinguishing start time was -10 s lower, and the user could act against disasters safely and rapidly.