Evaluation of the Effect of VR Disaster Experience in Familiar
Environment
Authors: Asaba Wataru , Ueda Kimi , Ishii Hirotake , Shimoda Hiroshi 
Published: February 2023

The number of natural disasters has been increasing in recent decades,
and the amount of damage becomes enormous. To reduce the damage, it is
crucial that people become more aware of disaster prevention and takes
action for disaster prevention and mitigation. As disaster education to
raise awareness, a method using virtual reality (VR) has been attractive
because the VR disaster experience is more realistic than a video showing
the scene of a disaster and requires less equipment than a simulated
experience using a quake simulator. It can also reproduce disasters that are
difficult to experience in reality, such as fire. However, in conventional
VR disaster experience systems, it is possible to experience only a specific
environment that the designer has selected and created in advance. The
environment is often different from that in which users spend their everyday
lives. Therefore, it was difficult to feel a sense of reality and fear that
a disaster might actually occur. In addition, from the viewpoint of
reviewing disaster countermeasures, there were few points that could be used
as references. In order to solve this problem, the authors have developed a
system that automatically creates a VR space that enables users to
experience a disaster based on images captured by cameras. This system makes
it very easy to experience disasters in the environment, which they spend
everyday lives in, constructed from pictures taken by them. Moreover, it may
raise awareness of disaster prevention. It is not clear, however, to what
extent the experience of a disaster in a familiar environment is effective,
or how the psychology of the experiencers changes when they experience a
disaster in a familiar environment.The purpose of this study is therefore to
evaluate whether the users’ awareness of disaster prevention improve when
they experience the VR disaster experience in a familiar environment like
their own room. In this study, earthquake and fire are treated as disasters
to be experienced.In the experiment, participants were asked to take
pictures of the room in which the participant spend their most of everyday
lives, and to experience virtual earthquake and fire in the room created
from the pictures and in the non-familiar environment. After experiencing
each disaster experience environment, they were asked to answer a
questionnaire about their awareness of disaster prevention, which included a
sense of reality, a sense of fear, a sense of familiar environment,
communication intention, disaster risk perception, anxiety and disaster
prevention behavioral intention. The results were used to compare the
effects of each disaster experience environment on the awareness of disaster
prevention.The results of the evaluation experiment showed the possibility
that the familiar environment can trigger participants to imagine that a
disaster will actually happen to them, and can increase their awareness of
disaster prevention. On the other hand, the results also suggested the
possibility that participants are more likely to notice unnatural places in
the experience such as objects’ movement in earthquake and the origin of
fire because it was very familiar environment for them.